Hey Folks! With the IDathon beginning in only 3 days, I have been thinking that I want to put in some extra special effort into annotating. So, two questions.
I annotate where I find it useful (for plants mostly means fruit) Sometimes for a taxon to get a better phenology graph - if there are not too many obs.
Not sure which plants would be most ‘useful’ to annotate, but for your second question- Nope. Sorry. I don’t think there are any leaderboards for annotations.
Not me personally, but…. I see from your iNat profile that you’re in N. America. The USA Phenology Network (which despite the name also covers Canada) has a citizen science project with a long list of plants and animals they’re tracking, mostly to see the effects of climate change. You might consider inclusion in their list as a kind of recommendation. Their list: https://naturesnotebook.usanpn.org/npnapps/species
You’ve got me thinking – it would be interesting to work from USA Phenology Network’s list, find species on that list that are often observed on iNat (so there’s a big sample size), then annotate those species on iNat. There’s also the possibility of setting up a project for one or more species. If I had the time to manage a project (which I don’t), I’d be thinking about setting up an iNat phenology project for Quercus alba, based on this USA Phenology Network campaign: https://www.usanpn.org/nn/campaigns/QuercusQuest
Thanks for your post. You’ve actually inspired me to do some more phenology annotating on iNat.
I have been working on some Ribes species flower/fruit phenology in and around California to do some phenology comparisons as an example of what iNat can do, but it is a lot of work. This may give some clues related to speciation and hybridization or might not show much at all beyond an interesting comparison of patterns you would expect. So far, there are a couple interesting patterns but a larger dataset would give a better picture. If anyone wants to help work on annotating some Ribes or wants to do some similar comparisons between other species, subspecies, or varieties, I think it would be definitely worthwhile. It’s definitively worth looking for species that do not have a lot of flower/fruit annotations as well to try to help out the phenology charts.
If you want to help work on Ribes flower and fruit phenology, it’s important to note that there may be more than one phenology stage shown in an observation (bud + flowers or flowers + fruit) and you need to flip through the photos to see this as sometimes they are in different photos. Sometimes it is tricky to choose. The sepals are closed right before it is in full flower and right after. When it is closed, I look for drying in the flower (indicating it is now in the early part of the fruit stage) and the size of the hypanthium covered ovary that will develop into the fruit. The ovary is smaller in bud and flower and increases in size after flowering. If the fruit/ovary has spines on it, these also generally increase in size after flower. An observation with parts labelled is here. That one I annotated as flowering and budding but that bud is about to open and has the stigma sticking out, so could arguably be called flowering. Here is a good example of one that has buds, flowers, and fruit (though the fruit is very immature). In the first photo of that observation, you can see how one closed flower has a larger ovary with longer spines than the open flower next to it. That is what I would call a very immature fruit as it is done flowering. You can see some buds in other photos from the same observation that have smaller ovaries and shorter spines. Where those decisions really matter is when there are no clearly receptive flowers but there are similar buds or immature fruits. We want to show at what times of the year the flowers can be pollinated vs not, which could indicate phenological divergence and/or opportunities for hybridization.
Quick links to some that would be good to work on:
Ribes roezlii
Ribes malvaceum
Ribes indecorum
Ribes sanguineum
Any Ribes in California not identified to species
That last one can be useful if an identifier wants to filter observation of Ribes to just flower or just fruit to focus on identifying by one of the those characters. The same principle could be applied to any other plant taxon and/or place as well.
Thanks to anyone that puts in this effort!
And here is a quick preview of flowering time of three Ribes species compared. Horizontal axis is day of the year relative to January 1st (-1 is Dec. 31) and vertical axis is latitude. Each point is an iNat observation annotated as flowering.
I would annotate flowering plants that are flowering out-of-range, such as if you are in Northeast US and you see anything sans Hamamelis flowering in December. These could be indicative of plants flowering later due to climate change or other factors such as artificial light/heat.
Also, did you know that you can go on the annotation page and quickly annotate with shortcuts? For example, pressing “v” followed by “g”(remember vegetation-green) will automatically annotate the plant as “Green Leaves”. “p” followed by “l” will give you flowering(for plant-fLowering) and “p” followed by “r” will give you fruiting(for plant-fRuiting).
Hope this helps!
