"Plant Blindness" and iNaturalist

I’ve generally taken most of my pictures of plants and fungi because they don’t run or fly away :-)

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Me too, especially when it comes vertebrate. I am most blind with birds and mammals, quite the opposite of most people getting into nature. Though, I haven’t gone so opposite as to have macro blindness (basically, only see the microscopic organisms). You’d have to be pretty hardcore to go that far!

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You found and caught some sweet herps when I was in Texas last year, Nathan!

Southwest Texas iNat-a-thon 2018 from iNaturalist on Vimeo.

(I do also have a shot in there of Nathan carefully photographing a plant as well)

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Interesting article! Lack of funding for–or even interest in–studying and protecting plant species is scary, given the rate at which species have been going extinct. All animals, including me and anyone reading this, depend on plants.

But when it comes to bemoaning the fact that people pay more attention to animals when they look around, I don’t see the problem. A plant will never attack unless you touch it. It won’t kill you unless you eat the wrong plant.

Yes, for most people today the biggest worry with animals is minor bites and stings, but our distant ancestors risked their lives if they didn’t initially tune out non-moving parts of the landscape and check for predatory animals.

That many people would agree with Jonathan that

is a different matter, and probably does tie in to inadequate attention to plant preservation.

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I have generally just thought of plants as part of background, like water and clouds and landscapes. Of course all of those can be classified, but I don’t focus my attention on them and try to identify every single one I see. Whereas when I see a bird or mammal I’m immediately wanting to know what it is (if I haven’t figured it out already). Invertebrates are somewhere in between depending on the situation and how much I know about identifying that category of invertebrate.

I can relate to what @jonathancampbell said a lot. I think part of it is that plants are just everywhere. They seem overwhelming both in the number of individuals present and the number of species possible, so it becomes just a blur of green with random species I know poking out. Anyway I’ve been trying to grow off the list I know and learn the weeds in my backyard and post random interesting-looking ones I see on my hikes so the blur is getting clearer over time. :)

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I love plants!! However, plant ID can be very difficult when using a photo. Plants also contain a huge number of species compared to organisms like birds, herps, leps, etc. Also, learning these other organisms in one’s geographic area is relatively easy with a good field guide and some time spent outdoors. Plant identification on the other hand typically requires the use of a dichotomous key and even then can be frustrating if one does not know the plant terminology (“…flowers in glomerules; pedicels shorter than calyx…” as an example). A good plant field guide is a great asset (Enquist - Wildflowers of the Texas Hill Country) but it does not contain all of the species in the “hill country.” I thought I “knew” my plants of the area until I purchased Correll and Johnston’s “The Manual of the Vascular Plants of Texas.” All that to say, it can be overwhelming unless you spend a great deal of time with it, and it helps to have a good mentor in the field with you. Oftentimes you take that photo, and do not realize in order to ID the plant you needed to photo the underside of a leaf, or petal. Not to mention the common names are all over the map. A Northern Cardinal is called the same thing in every state, but one plant can have a myriad of common names. Someone might try to ID a plant with the common name, which is not the one iNat recognizes and give up altogether on IDing the plant. I am very cautious with my IDs. I typically ID to genus unless I am certain of the species. I’m not sure how to overcome all of that, but it is easy to understand why plant blindness exists.

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I guess I do tend to make an exception for reptiles (I wanted to be a herpetologist before I switched to botany). :-) Some of my favorite photos combine herps and Euphorbias. This has got to be one of my favorites: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9297777
The trip in the video was a lot of fun!

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That’s good to know! Usually when I see them they’re in unknown or state of matter life limbo

I did think about biases within the plant kingdom a bit, but between plants that are large and/or have showy flowers vs. say, Order Poales, which seems to get a bit less love. I totally didn’t think about non-vascular plants, so I guess that means I also have

Thanks! That’s very kind of you to offer to help. Yeah, maybe I’ll give it a go. I’m sure as soon as I start I’ll get sucked in pretty quickly :P

When I first read this, I thought this plant blindness didn’t really apply to me since I even go out of my way to look for moss, lichen, pollen, algae, etc. But then I remembered grasses. Years of being forced to mow the lawn in the hot sun in my childhood have made me absolutely loathe grasses more than anything (although I have nothing but nice things to say about sugar cane). As a consequence, all grass mostly looks the same to me and I completely ignore them.

It’s really not fair that my feud with lawn grass spills over to graminoids in general, so I went out of my way to look at some grass today and discovered that the spikelets on it had layers of leaves that could be peeled back like corn. A neat discovery for me, even if it is perfectly obvious in retrospect. Didn’t manage to see anything resembling sex organs though, so I already have my next goal.

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I love plants and have a few interesting plants, however this site seems to frown extensively on posting anything that isn’t “wild”. Personally it’s not very important to me whether something is wild or cultivated, I enjoy seeing the plant, period. But since this site caters more to scientific purposes, I guess it makes a difference.

Then there is that crazy vagueness between wild and cultivated. I recently posted a picture of a Gardenia and someone labeled it “casual”. This property has been in my family for 60 years, I vaguely remember the gardenia that was planted, it died. The rootstock decided to grow and hence I have a large specimen of Gardenia thunbergia. Did I plant it? No, in my opinion, but if I have to think that hard, it’s not worth the effort.

Sometimes being too scientific really just takes the enjoyment out of photos and nature.

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They don’t run or fly, but they do shiver in the wind, just as I click the shutter.

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their lack of mobility actually makes them more interesting to me, not less. Especially trees. A 100 year old tree has to have had conditions that would at least allow that species to survive, for 100 years. That’s a lot of information right there. And when you add competition between plants, predation, weather, everything else… so many stories in the plants, related to a point on the map. I love it.

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It can be a beautifully calm day, and as soon as I want to take a picture a sudden hurricane comes thru… okay, I may be exaggerating a little, but it feels like it.

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Great idea, susanhewitt!

MY gateway to botany was the terrific book “Common Backyard Weeds Of The Upper Midwest,” by Teresa Marrone. It’s perfect for the urban flora of the North American Great Lakes region.

Can anybody suggest any other books for different regions?

“Crabgrass? Dandelions? Purple thistle? I’ve been trying to get my hands on some good urban flora for YEARS now!”
- The Lindworm, “Hilda.”

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I actually got invested in iNaturialist due to being a beginning gardener at the time I heard about this site via NPR two years or so ago. It’s actually helped my gardening a lot, because I know what things are, which things are invasive, which things to just keep if they ‘volunteer’ themselves, etc.

I wonder if part of the problem with plant blindness is that many IDs count on very specific markers, and sometimes, there’s more than a handful of species native to an area. If I see a blue jay at my bird feeder in my location, I know it’s a blue jay. If I see a wild larkspur blooming in early spring, it’s pretty much going to be Dwarf Larkspur.

If I see a sedge species, I just blindly look at the observation and wish it godspeed towards getting to species, because I didn’t know what a sedge actually was until 1-2 years ago and don’t get me started on grasses.

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@chemistree Interesting article! The term “green wall” is a term I frequently hear when discussing “plant blindness”, referring to the way that many people view plants as simply part of the background. The process of removing “plant blindness” is then referred to as “breaking down the green wall”.

I 100% agree with @susanhewitt. Weeds are a great gentle introduction to plants. When we cover plants in class my students often bring a photo of a weed to me for an ID. Afterwords they often describe a “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon” effect in that they see it everywhere! It’s not that the plant wasn’t there before, they just didn’t notice it. Little by little they were “breaking down the green wall” in their mind.

Guilty!

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Thanks! Your comments regarding the “green wall” brings to mind one sentence from the article:

Children recognise that animals are living creatures before they can tell that plants are also alive.

For me, the “green wall” didn’t start to crumble until a college assignment forced the unsettling realization that I had no idea what most of the plants I grew up with were. As others have said, iNat has been (and continues to be) a huge help in that regard.

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Ah, this reminds me of one time I took one of my (high-school) classes on a trip. We were in a greenhouse, surrounded by all sorts of exotic plants, and some bird cawed. One of the students promptly observed: “It’s the only other living thing in here with us!”. :roll_eyes:

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