Overthinking plant identification

General
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Like you, I’m not an expert in any field of biology, but I do have a good amount of experience just from exploring on my own and being curious about the plants that I saw where I grew up and when I was out and about.

Since I’m from British Columbia, I’ve opted to focus there. It helps catalogue the local biodiversity AND it also helps me to learn the local flora and fauna. It’s one thing to just narrow the location, but it also helps to narrow things to ones I’m largely familiar with and which I know are locally found. Like you, I have some local sources that I regularly consult.

But largely these are species where I know:

  1. There’s a narrow set of possible species because of the geographic limits, so it’s usually going to be one of the ones I know.
  2. These are species where I have enough familiarity to ID without resorting to a key (or that one essential piece of the key has been internalized)

So to make this all go smoothly, I made my own custom search URL. There’s an excellent tutorial on the iNaturalist custom URL search features.

I use the “Search multiple taxa using a List” method, for which I keep a list of BC species (most are native, but some are imports & invasives) that I feel relatively confident in identifying. That list has a list_id value (e.g. list_id=1139967 … though that isn’t mine). There’s also an associated place_id for British Columbia (place_id=7085).

So if I wanted to do IDs in Canada (place_id=6712) with a particular list (list_id=1139967), the URL would look like this:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?place_id=6712&list_id=1139967&quality_grade=needs_id

I keep that bookmarked so I can quickly get back to identifying local & familiar flora.

The downside of that method is that it only catches something if there’s a preliminary ID of a taxon in your list. Two ways to address that shortcoming are:

  1. To include higher level taxons in your list.
  2. Create a list for the higher level taxons that you want to ID within & repeat with that.

At present I’m not great with mosses, save for a few. So I only include the small handful of exact moss species that I know & don’t have any higher level moss taxons.

It isn’t a perfect method, but it’s darn near close enough. And it does allow me to be more selective and contribute in a more useful fashion. Plus my home province has an unending stream of observations that need IDs. (We seem to have several professional biology folks who upload in bulk!)

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