Description of need:
When learning to ID plants (and probably fungi and other kingdoms), one learns family traits quite a lot. There’s a great opportunity to reinforce these trait<->family relationships every time I look at an observation, mine or someone else’s. Indeed, in most botanical keys, floras, checklists, and personal plant lists, family is either a key organizing principle or written down with the observation: “Plagiobothrys nothofulvus (Boraginaceae)”, for example.
Feature request details:
I imagine this feature would be a setting related to other content display settings. For example, an additional setting on the “Scientific Name (Common Name)” drop down. Or perhaps “Family” could be treated as a special kind of “Common Name” using the new “multiple common name lexicons” feature.
On common-name view it does sometimes kind of already do this if the suggestion doesn’t have a common name:
It’s inconsistent though - that genus shows as a member of a tribe, but this Erodium without a common name shows as a member of a family (it doesn’t have subfamilies or tribes defined):
If you are a taxon specialist in your niche - pointless.
If you ID for a chosen location, Unknowns, the family is useful info. For homonyms it might help if we had more info than a few pixels in a teensy taxon thumbnail (some are what even IS that?!)
Two more words on the screen - Family Asteraceae. We have a weekly list for our Fynbos Rambles and I asked to have the family added - when you see a new plant for the first time - who is your family? - is a huge part of the learning curve for the next time you see That one
Sometimes iNat shows the family. Other times it doesn’t.
Latest example - for the non-taxon specialists it would be interesting to see that this family has only that one genus. It is a missing piece of useful information. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/200991126
I would find this most helpful in the ID suggestions. Sometimes I am given a suggested genus with all or the majority of the other suggested IDs from other genera. Are all or most of these suggestions in a common family? I’d rather ID at that level if I’m unsure. In those cases I have to open up the taxon page for each suggestion to try to deduce how they are related.
While I’m for this request, after discussion we decided that the added complexity in user settings and new designs are not something we would work on. Users can click on the taxon and see the family the taxon belongs to.
