I really like the idea of connecting it to the taxon page somehow.
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Hi, @Blaserk! When we added an iNaturalist component to our San Diego County Plant Atlas, our project manager Millie Basden wrote up a guide to photographing plants. Here it is.
http://www.sdplantatlas.org/inat/iNatPhotoguide.html
Judy
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Yay, thanks everyone!!! This is great help, keep it coming! :D
(And agreed with everyone above on adding this info to taxa pages)
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You can add all manner of links to the taxon page. Under the ABOUT tab you can add links to comments, journal posts etc. On the right is More Info, click on the Add Link button and away you go :-) If the link is pertinent to all child taxa, you can add the link to all of them in one go (thereās an option called Add to Children or something like that).
Examples:
Link to a key in a project journal post for the Amerila spp. adults - https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/126085-Amerila
Link to a comment for notes on distinguishing brown Hippotion caterpillars - https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/199458-Hippotion-celerio
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I donāt know if it is the current heavy load situation or happens all the time, but when I checked those taxa pages out, there were no links. I searched all over the page, not links to journal posts or anything that might be other than wiki pageā¦ then when I went from the second one back to the first, it was there on the right hand side where you said it would be! It must be a very low priority load for the page, and site traffic can make it very slow to load, in excess of a minute in my case just now. I will re-check it later today when it is less busy, and see if it comes up sooner.
[edit: Checked just now (14h later), site traffic much lower, taxa page loads much faster and almost no delay before the link appears.]
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With fungi, you need to put in your observation the substrate it was growing inādirt, dead leaves, a conifer log, etc. If it is growing on the ground, note what kind of trees it was growing near, because many species are only associated with certain trees. If you can legally remove the mushroom, take a spore print and note the color.
How to take a spore print: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/studying.html#sporeprint
If it has a distinctive smell besides āmushroomy,ā note that.
Squeeze the stem and note if there is a color change, called bruising. You may have to wait a minute for the color to turn.
Use a pocket knife to cut the gills or pores. Note if there is a color change. If a milky substance oozes from the gills, your mushroom belongs to the genus Lactarius.
Mushrooms are a poorly studied taxon, especially outside of Europe, so donāt be surprised if your specimen canāt be identified beyond genus or family.
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Another thing to consider for these guides is a way to allow the iNat app to display them. Navigating the iNat site on a phone is hard, and making these guides easier to find (either with links or directly viewing them) could allow the app to serve as a handy resource for what to take photos of.
On another note, if youāre using a camera to take photos, Iāve actually found a small app that allows me to show measurements in a pinch.
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I donāt think Iāve seen this written here yet but in a similar vein to some other comments about how to hold the camera, I learned today that if you regularly use binoculars on a harness or strap in the field they can be useful to rest your phone on when crouching to photograph insects or anything really. The stability of resting the phone or camera lightly on the bins contributed, accidentally, to my taking better photos with a challenging subject. I sort of just ādiscoveredā this by accident and Iām going to do it intentionally now.
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Just a warningāthe last time I had on binoculars with a harness and a camera on a neck-strap, I lost 2 camera batteriesāI figured out too late that the battery compartment was being accidentally opened by movement against the binoculars.
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yikes.
I was just using my iphone. Thanks for sharing that thoughā¦youāve probably just unknowingly prevented a lot of really bad days. Iāll definitely keep that in mind when Iām using the fancier stuff.
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It occurred to me that in a sense, each couplet in a dichotomous key asks about a distinctive characteristic; this would suggest what photos to take.
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Just curious, why the bottom of the leaves? I can understand the top part, for the veins/leaf patternsā¦
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Sometimes the presence and appearance of hairs or scales on the underside (only) is diagnostic for ferns. (In your area, itās helpful for cinnamon fern, which has little tufts of rusty-colored hair where each leaflet meets the main axis of the leaf.) Plus the soriāthe clusters of spore-producing sacsāare usually on the underside of a leaf, and sometimes seeing their shape and the surrounding tissues is helpful.
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I donāt know how or where this info would be displayed on iNat, but BugGuide has an annotated photo list of the critical images needed for IDing insects in each and every Order (some broken down to family). Each photo can be clicked to go to the original image. It truly is invaluable.
https://bugguide.net/node/view/258535
A sample for Spiders:
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In the Lantanas one of the keying features is whether abaxial hairs on the bottom of the leaf are pilose or strigose. Whether stems are thorny or not can be another key characteristic. Many photographers image only the colorful inflorescence, but sorting out Lantanas requires leaf margins, leaf bottoms, stems, fruit color, and, yes, the flowers too!
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Our Searsia tomentosa - green above, and furry below.
Without the below picture, it is much harder to ID definitely.
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This is amazing! Thank you!!!
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Great question, and I echo the great answers already given!
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Iāll add another reason for the ventral of leavesā¦ often they are hiding insects that can give you an extra observation/species, and possibly even give clues (via associations) to the plant ID!
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Ok, ty!