While I do acknowledge that humans often curious children will disturb mushrooms and leave them “unsightly”.
We are not too different from the rest of nature. Sometimes I am out in places where I know I am the first person to step foot in an area within a few days. There are fresh mushrooms uprooted with signs of squirrels chewing and being curious, often lately seeing it with russula sp, sometimes even finding them half nibbled on a low lying branch.
Humans do have a choice and maybe you could argue a certain responsibility because we consider ourselves more sentient and you might want your trail to appear a certain way, However, the woods will be full of disturbed fruting bodies regardless, and the lack of harm to the mycelieum is even between human disturbance and any other animal.
Unlike human disturbance in a lot of other ways(littering, disturbance of sensitivate habitats by footsteps etc) this is a very minor thing and the biggest impact is that it might look bad for a little bit. I think it would be nice to refocus attention to more impactful human disturbances.
I uproot mushrooms to take better pictures of the gills and the collar, but my rule is to only do it if there are several mushrooms together (and doing it ony to one).
I don’t uproot mushrooms. Here I found three (IIRR) mushrooms and photographed the one it was easiest to see the underside of.
I don’t know mushrooms well. If it looks like a mushroom, whether it has gills or sponge, I type “mushr” and select Agaricomycetes. Any other fungus I just put in Fungi, unless it’s an obvious asco or something I know what is, like bread mold.
Most birds to me are just birds, though I’ve identified a heron by the shape of its neck and a guinea by its spotted feather. If I find an unidentified ob that looks like a bird, I call it a bird. I know that the bird that says “cheatercheaterchea” is a Carolina wren, but Carolina wrens say other things too.
As others have said here, better information makes it easier to ID. An important part of that is making sure you provide as many clear photos it takes to get the observation as close as possible to accurate ID.
Also, remember that some plants have several parts in one “patch” but may still just one plant (vines, aspen, and fungi come to mind) so it isn’t necessary try to submit each one separately. In that case you can include a photo of the group to provide context.
Coming back to the original post, I wanted to mention another thing that I have done without much scientific or id knowledge (but some local knowledge): I add common names on my language (Spanish) when they are not present in iNat. Here a tutorial for it, if you are interested: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-add-a-common-name-to-a-taxon/9792
This is something I can do without knowing much, because I can take the information from wikipedia or field guides.
and vitally important that people can search iNat for the name they know and use, across all our human languages beyond Botanese and the other kingdoms.
Thanks! I’ve flagged some possible errors (some turned out to be errors, some not) in Spanish common names, and I added “bolete mold” to a fungus already called “bolete mould”, as I’m American and “mold” is the usual spelling here. If you add something like “chompipe”, note where that word is used; it’s also called “pavo” and “guajolote”.
I’ve been using iNaturalist for years now and even today, many of my observations are of species I have no experience identifying. I make observations of such species in the hopes of finding something that may be of interest to someone out there. It’s happened to me a few times where I observed something mysterious to me and it turned out to not have many observations on iNaturalist at all!
I think when you observe many different living things, you cast a large net and eventually you find something that really fascinates you. Something that you dedicate time to understand and after much time has gone by, you have enough knowledge to share with others. And that’s one of the major reasons I use iNat. It’s a platform that encourages people to engage with nature and help out their fellow naturalists :)
You don’t need any experience with ID-ing, and definitely don’t feel as though you’re ‘not contributing’, because you are!
Submitting observations with no ID at all is frustrating, and you should definitely avoid doing that. Even if the best ID you can give an observation is to get it in the right kingdom, it’s important to do that, as it helps get the observation to the people who can give it a more precise ID. Consider this a scolding, and promise never to submit an observation without at least a kingdom-level ID again!
I think a lot of fungi do end up sticking at the ‘kingdom’ level as they’re so difficult to ID. About 30% of all my fungus obs are stuck at ‘Fungi including lichens’. The best we can do is to provide clear photos so that we’re giving good evidence to the experts.
Thunderhead posted a reply with a link to a GREAT tutorial on how to help with IDs even without advanced knowledge. I think it is great to upload as much as you like (and try to give high level IDs as others have suggested, rather than leave as unknown…that will help you get IDs from others, too).
If you want and are able to contribute sometimes with IDs, then that video will be a great start.
back when I went to a biodiversity hotspot and saw cool fungi I only took overall pics and now I regret it