One other genus to remember, because it’s common in cultivation in the southern and western USA. Hesperaloe. They flower a bunch, so there’s almost always flower stalks hanging out with seed pods in fall through spring. https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2022/05/26/red-yucca-is-latest-texas-superstar/
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The issue is: what is a legume? How to unequivocally define a legume?
Unfortunately not every legume is like those of the beans or the peas, that is multiseeded, elongated and dehiscent. Legumes often display a very high morphological variability among genera and species. So you can find indehiscent legumes with just one seed (like those of the highly invasive Amorpha fruticosa), others usually with 1-2 seeds and indehhiscent (like in peanuts), others rather large, indehiscent, one-seeded and with fleshy and thick pericarp, or also other that are extremely large (up to 1 meter and possibly more). I would say that it is useful to combine the observation of the fruits that are possibly legumes with that of the flowers that could match one of the three subfamilies (Faboideae, Caesalpinioideae and Mimosoideae).
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Euphorbia are in the same genus because even though there is a huge range of diversity in their form and ecology, botanists have considered a smooth gradient from one extreme to another. There are some “steps” between distinct groups of species, and that’s why subgenera exist. Because Euphorbia has remained as a stable single genus, it fairly indicates that there is a consensus of enough intermediate species that distinct genera are inappropriate. But there was an exception, where not too long ago, the subgenus Chaemasyce (carpeting Euphorbia) was made into a distinct genus. But that has since been reverted back to a subgenus of Euphorbia, so it must have been the opinion of only one person.
The choice of applying different genera, species, or subspecies to plants is seemingly 80% science, 20% arbitrary. Sometimes the arbitrary factor is necessary, for reasons I wont detail here. But in part it means someone else may look at the facts and evidence and decide they are different genera, or not. These levels of difference also are not consistent between every plant genus. For instance, some plants in one genus may look very alike but are considered by that author to be distinct species. An identical case with another genus and another author may result in only subspecies of one species. This is why there are some plants that change in their taxonomy, as newer authors find new evidence, or future authors decide the old call was incorrect.
Thus, if you consider that 20% of the vote is arbitrary per person, the fact that Euphorbia has remained one genus is a pretty good indicator that botanists and taxonomists agree it should be one genus. TLDR; you can contrast Euphorbia species that look nothing like each other, but at the end of the day there are apparently too many intermediate examples to distinguish them as unique genera.
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Very interesting.
Is it possible to identify a pod as a legume (Fabaceae) based on the pod cell structure?
Can we confirm that Brassicaceae or Bignoniaceae pods (not mentioning Apocynaceae fruits) always have an innner structure different from the Fabaceae pod cell(s) structure? Is that true for all families that have pod(-like) fruits ?
I agree, though I would definitely break up the genus if I had a good sense for how at this point.
For identification, I generally just use the section-level classification as if they were genera. With the exception of subg. Esula, subgenus classification is almost useless for learning the variation within the genus. All you’ve got to do is look at sect. Nummulariopsis (subg. Euphorbia) and compare to sect. Alectoroctonum (subg. Chamaesyce) to understand that. Nearly all of the subgenera include esula-like plants, succulents, and tropical woody plants. Even section-level can be too complicated in some cases (see sect. Pacificae of subg. Euphorbia). That said, most of the larger sections have been considered genera at one point or another and the better circumscribed sections have clear apomorphies that help define them. Under that finer taxonomy, all of what is now Euphorbia was equivalent to the tribe Euphorbieae of Euphorbiaceae.
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Did you know that if you’re working through the web interface on a windows computer, you can turn on clipboard history? Instead of Ctrl+V, use Windows Key+V. The first time you use it, you need to turn it on but after that, it saves up to 20 copied items. I will save several like “Angiospermae,” “Pinopsida,” “Magnoliopsida,” “Insecta,” etc. Then I get a dropdown list of common terms I can choose from. I’m not sure how to do it on an Apple machine though.
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Legumes are under Fabaceae in the classification. Many species have compound leaves.The flowers, fruit pods may have some clues to its species. The pods of unknown plants may be mistaken for being in the Fabaceae, for example, Kigelia africana has a pod, but it is not in the fabaceae family.
If I’m identifying unknown plants, I’ll filter for plants, together with another filter for country or region, continent. That will decrease the amount of observation to an area. It is possible to set the filter to just plants, or to any level of the classification. I mean like Fabaceae, Euphorbiaceae, ferns, monocots, dicots…with or without further separation by country/region.
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And here I’m thinking: but those look nothing like legume pods!
I would have answered that every plant with a bean pod sort of fruiting structure (as opposed to other pods that are not like bean pods) is a legume.
If a plant has divided leaves and its fruits look like a legume, go ahead and put it in Fabaceae (legume or bean family). It’s probably a legume and if it’s not, somebody will get a pleasant feeling of superiority when putting it where it belongs.
Probably plants with intermediate morphology make it hard to divided Euphorbia into neat genera. And be careful what we wish for – if the genus is divided up, identifying many of the species to genus will be difficult. I’m fine with a big genus, even if I have to learn multiple search images for it.
I vary. Sometimes for Vascular Plants or Flowering Plants, to avoid all the groups I know so little about. Less often Dicots or Monocots, but sometimes.
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Well, in general: the more specific an ID you can provide, the more effective this is going to be for getting an observation seen relatively quickly. My impression (in Europe) is that a common and easily identifiable plant observation that has been given an initial ID of “Plantae” will tend to sit around quite a bit longer than if it has been ID’d at the genus or family level, or even as “dicots”. Note that there are a couple of levels between “Plantae” and “dicots”/“monocots” which can be useful: “vascular plants” (excluding mosses and algae) and “angiosperms” (vascular plants excluding ferns and conifers).
That said, obviously there are going to be some observations where you simply don’t know, and the computer suggestions don’t give any useful hints about the likely family or order, and entering “Plantae” in such cases seems like it is still an improvement over “unknown”. There are always going to be observations that are assigned an ID of “Plantae” because it is an iconic taxon on iNat and it is the logical place for someone who isn’t conversant with botanical taxonomy to put observations of, well, plants.
I’m not sure I would call myself a botanist, but as for my practices: I do not typically filter for “Plantae” because in my usual workflow this would mean I would end up with mostly observations I can’t identify.
I do a lot of mid-level IDing, filtering for everything between “dicots” and family level, as I’ve found this tends to be my sweet spot for finding stuff that has gotten “stuck” (due to disagreements, or not quite specific enough to get seen by the specialists) while still being rewarding enough to be satisfying (the right mixture of organisms I recognize or ones I can help with after a little research, without so many garden plants, multiple-species observations, or photos lacking identifiable features that I get frustrated). For observations older than a few months, filtering for “Plantae” at family level or higher would mean lots and lots of grasses, ferns, and mosses, none of which I am much good at identifying at present.
I suppose I should make a point of occasionally filtering for the exact taxon “Plantae” to help rescue anything that has ended up there, however.
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But - effectively moving an honest Unknown, where some identifiers are busy with cleanup on aisle 3 - to trapped in Plantae where no one looks at it, no longer Unknown but also not filterable for planty taxon specialists who mostly start at family at least.
Someone needs to volunteer to tackle the Needs ID broad planty. I am doing the Western Cape …
Please note that I was not suggesting “label unknowns as Plantae to get them out of unknown”, but rather “try to provide an ID that is as specific as possible” – i.e., if you can’t determine a genus or family or order, try dicots or monocots; if you can’t tell which it is, try angiosperms or vascular plants; select Plantae only if you cannot determine whether it is a vascular plant, with the assumption that this will be only a very small number of cases.
I also specifically did point out that we need people to go through Plantae in any case (mea culpa, I will try to make a point of adding this to my workflow), not because of well-intentioned efforts to move stuff out of “unknown”, but because plants sometimes end up there for various other reasons: e.g. because users click the leaf symbol in the list of iconic taxa, or because of disagreements like red algae vs. green algae or certain tiny dicots or conifers being confused with mosses.
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I can tell the difference between bean pods and other kinds of pods (milkweed pods look nothing like bean pods), so maybe I should just call bean-pod Unknowns Legumes until proven wrong. I don’t really mind being wrong; I learn something that way.
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You get the checkmark for Solution, because you answered all the question in one post.
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Sometimes I feel guilty for just calling an Unknown plant Plants, if it’s possible to call it Monocot/Dicot or Vascular Plants or whatever, but I figure that even just calling it Plants is a small but helpful improvement on Unknown, particularly if the observation has been sitting in Unknowns for 8 or 9 months.
When I finish with Unknowns (as if that will ever happen!), I’ll work on Plants, I promise.
In reality, I do call Unknowns to family if I can, but there are many dicots where I can’t do better than Dicot. So as a result of this conversation, I’ve started calling them Dicots (or Monocots).
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I can’t give much input on your last 3 questions, but regarding your first one:
No - not every bean pod bearing plant is a legume
Some plants in the Amaryllidaceae and Hyacinthaceae have pods too. For example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11170106
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11198077
Obviously, those capsules are alot more rotund and bulky than the pods of traditional Legumes, but they can often differ in length between species and genera
So I would say that pods are not unique to the family Fabaceae (legumes), but rather, the uniqueness lies in the compactness of the pods (to a lesser extent), as well as the direction and angle/s of dehiscence
For example, Legume pods that do dehisce (some drop off the tree and remained sealed until the pod decomposes and leave the seeds entrenched) almost always dehisce from the top down, or from the apex of the pod to the base of attachment
Whereas, Genera such as Schizocarphus dehisce in the opposite direction (base of attachment to apex of pod)
Hope that clears up that particular question 
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I guess different locations vary depending on identifier preferences in those areas. I’m happy to have Plantae to look through for the Southern Appalachians. If I go through unknowns for my area and get annoyed by too many traces of poop and tracks, globs of the fungal/slimemold type, rocks and clouds and other kinds of non-planty stuff, my next course of action is to switch to Plantae at kingdom level and see what I can clear out of that. Sometimes I go straight for Plantae skipping the unknowns. I treat that category sort of like unknowns but presorted to just the plants.
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The pods of those two observations look quite different to me than the pods of legumes, but I understand your point. Thanks!
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