Pinyon jays are endemic to the Western United States, and as their name suggests, they are closely associated with pinyon pines. Unfortunately, the population of these social birds has declined to the extent that they are now being considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act.
No one is sure why Pinyon Jays are declining, but one hypothesis is that pinyon pine nut production is decreasing in frequency and abundance.
The Great Basin Bird Observatory has launched a citizen science initiative to record pinyon jays habitat use, as well as habitat quality indicators such as pinyon pine cone productivity.
iNaturalist already has more than 25,000 verifiable observations of pinyon pines! This is a great example of how iNat could help provide data for pinyon jay research.
However, it is not currently possible to add phenology annotations (whether pine trees have cones or not) to pine tree observations. Adding annotations to conifers has been discussed extensively elsewhere on the iNat forum and my intent here is not to repeat that discussion.
I just wanted to highlight an important example of how iNat can support conservation research. Pinyon jays are amazing! Pine trees are amazing!
Thank you!
That would be a good reason to let us annotate pine cones.
I didn’t know that you couldn’t add a “Fruits or Seeds” annotation to pines. Is that any reason for that?
See the Forum link in the OP for the discussion around that.
There is an existing observation field that someone created for “Conifer Phenology,” though it seems like it could use a couple more categories. If this isn’t sufficient, one could always create a different field with categories more useful for tracking Pinyon Jays.
This botanist’s favorite bird call, btw… 
There’s 940 comments in the thread, and some cursory searching didn’t turn up anything specifically related to why conifers don’t have a “fruit/seed” option like other plants do.
A search of the Annotations topic for “gymnosperm” or “conifer” turns up lots of mentions, some noting differences in terminology etc. But the main thing is the staff summary at the very top of the topic, showing the current pending requests and the issues that remain to be resolved before they can be considered, and the accompanying staff post below it. Conifer phenology is the first item listed.
My understanding is that new annotations are also major system upgrades that involve new indexing loads, new UI elements, etc., which is why staff wants to add them infrequently, and have them well thought-out, to be confident that they are addressing all the right taxa and the optimal set of annotation values, and that their overall value to the platform merits the development effort.
The best way to potentially move something forward would be to add a well-thought out proposal to the discussion and see if others respond with further ideas or potential issues.
Meanwhile, so as not to hold our breath and still do something potentially helpful for the Pinyon Jay, creating an equally well thought-out Observation Field would be the best immediate work-around.