Split Plantae into several iconic taxa

[lappelbaum]

@annkatrinrose

Option 1: Split all the land plants (embryophytes) into their four categories: 1) angiosperms, 2) gymnosperms, 3) seedless vascular plants, and 4) bryophytes.

I tried to represent your idea here:

Angiosperms - 27,539,134 - 37.8%
Gymnosperms - 779,163 - 1.1%
Seedless Vascular - 895,522 - 1.2%
Bryophytes - 493,965 - 0.7%

Chromista is already an iconic taxa. Do you want to move every Plantae not in the groups above into a combined iconic taxa with Chromista? The color for Chromista is brown. You would be including a lot of green things.

Plant Algaes - 620,332 - 0.9%
Chromista - 95,114 - 0.1%
Chromista & Plant Algaes - 715,446 - 1.0%

Edited to add:

Alternatively
Angiosperms - 27,539,134 - 37.8%
Gymnosperms - 779,163 - 1.1%
Seedless Vascular - 895,522 - 1.2%
Non-Vascular - 1,114,297 - 1.5%
Chromista - 95,114 - 0.1%

[DianaStuder]

@tiwane
38% of obs are flowering plants.
We earn at least a generic daisy vs all the tiddly animal groups. Not so?

For roughly sorting unknowns, it would help to be able to simply split flowering from other plants.

[annkatrinrose]

@chrisangell

when you can just as easily search for Bryophyta (or any other group) on the Identify page

Not so easy actually since “bryophytes” is not a taxon on iNat currently. Bryophyta is just the mosses, excluding liverworts and hornworts, so to sort through all bryophytes (and there are experts on iNat who might do that) requires some search URL modifications and can’t be done with a simple click of a button. Nor can a plant that could be either a liverwort or a hornwort be identified as a bryophyte currently to get it out of Plantae.

@tiwane

I really like your icons, @annkatrinrose, they’re great! However, I think many people wouldn’t understand the fourth one (I don’t think I would if no one told me what it was) and I supsect that the lack of a Plantae one would be missed.

Thanks! It did take some thinking and experimenting to figure out something simple enough to still be clear in the small size it would be on the Identify page. Someone with more graphic design experience could certainly improve them. I’m not sure what, if anything, could be used to clearly say “moss” to most people, but one thing to keep in mind is the target audience. I think it would be clear to a botanist, and others could easily learn the icons. I was puzzled by the weirdo blob for Protozoa at first, but once I figured out what it meant and went “oh, an amoeba with nucleus, gotcha” I never had to question it again. It’s part of the learning experience that makes iNat so great. And yes, it would be good to keep Plantae around. There currently appear to be over 500,000 Plantae observations in “needs ID” at kingdom level and there will likely always be more so it would still be good to have. It’s the largest group in Needs ID before Fungi and the unknowns. I wasn’t sure if overlap with other, more refined taxa would be an issue, since the plant kingdom is kind of nested in terms of taxa.

@fffffffff

Could all icons have a small text underneath them?

They all pop up the name of the taxon when I hover my mouse over them, at least in my browser.

@jdmore

Currently I don’t mind typing vasc into the taxon filter box when I want to select for vascular plants, or angio for flowering plants, or dicot.

That works for taxa that exist on iNat, but there is currently no option for non-vascular plants, seedless plants, or gymnosperms. These groupings, while usually filling dedicated chapters in botany textbooks, don’t exist as taxa on iNat apparently.

@lappelbaum

The iconic taxa can be paraphyletic, like other animals. Other animals still needs to be added to the filter box.

Yes, Chromista is missing from the box as well. And that grouping is not only paraphyletic, but probably polyphyletic.

@pisum

just for reference, out of 30.3M verifiable plant observations

There are also over 3.5 million (>10% of total plants) of “captive” plant observations with photos that are probably perfectly verifiable but not eligible for RG since they have been rendered casual by being marked cultivated. This cultivated plants group alone is larger than most of the other iconic taxa with the exception of insects, birds and fungi. Excluding that group underestimates the total number of plants that people have uploaded in hopes of getting an ID.

@lappelbaum

All Plants - 30,328,116 - 42%

I assume this is again “verifiable” observations only? I found 35,214,006 plants total. Regardless of what the exact numbers are, Plantae is by far the largest group of observations and splitting it would still leave Flowering Plants as by far the largest group among the iconic taxa. Seedless vascular and gymnosperms each would slot in between amphibians/mollusks and the ray-finned fish, bryophytes would come in just short of the number of fish but still more than 5x as much as protozoa and chromista, which already have their own iconic taxa. (The numbers for prokaryote and virus observations seem negligible by comparison to everything else.)

@lappelbaum

Embryophytes - 493,965 - 0.7%

I assume you mean Bryophytes? (Embryophytes are all land plants, so basically all Plantae minus the algae in that group.)

@lappelbaum

Chromista is already an iconic taxa. Do you want to move every Plantae not in the groups above into a combined iconic taxa with Chromista?

Oh no, those are different groups based on the origin of their plastids and I think trying to combine all the “algae” would be asking for trouble and confusion. Alga is more of a descriptive term for a photoautotrophic microbe/protist than a taxonomic term. Not all the groups in Chromista are photosynthetic, while there are also photosymbionts in protozoa, plus there’s the blue-green “algae” (cyanobacteria) in the prokaryotes. So I’m not quite sure what to call the leftover phyla of the Plantae kingdom once land plants have been removed - maybe Archaeplastidial Protists? That’s a mouthful… Maybe just leave them in “other plants” for now (similar to how prokaryotes linger in the “Life” category) even though botanically speaking they are not really true plants.

[lappelbaum]

@lappelbaum

The iconic taxa can be paraphyletic, like other animals. Other animals still needs to be added to the filter box.

@annkatrinrose

Yes, Chromista is missing from the box as well. And that grouping is not only paraphyletic, but probably polyphyletic.

Oops, Other Animals is polyphyletic, not paraphyletic. I got my terminology mixed up.

@annkatrinrose

I assume this is again “verifiable” observations only?

I didn’t think about this, but yeah I was counting verifiable only because it’s the default in the filter box.

[lappelbaum]

@annkatrinrose

I assume you mean Bryophytes? (Embryophytes are all land plants, so basically all Plantae minus the algae in that group.)

I was confused by the term “bryophytes”. Before your post I assumed that meant members of Phylum Bryophyta. I tried to read up about it but got confused. I see now that I misread the article I was looking at. It said that bryophytes were part of Embryophyta, not that they were the same thing. Where I put embryophytes, assume I meant “non vascular land plants”. I edited my earlier post to say “Bryophytes” instead of “Embryophytes”.

@annkatrinrose

I think trying to combine all the “algae” would be asking for trouble and confusion.

I agree, it would be asking for trouble. I misunderstood, thinking that was what you wanted to do. I was calling the leftover plants “Plant Algaes” in my example above. Considering there are more “plant algae” obs than “bryophyte” obs, maybe they should be combined into “non-vascular plants”

[annkatrinrose]

@lappelbaum

I was confused by the term “bryophytes”.

You’re not the only one! Depending on the book/paper you look at, the term is either used for the entire group or for mosses only. In the botany texts I have, the “bryophytes” or nonvascular plants are treated as three separate groups: 1. Division/phylum Bryophyta (mosses), 2. division/phylum Hepatophyta/Marchantiophyta (liverworts), and 3. division/phylum Anthocerotophyta (hornworts). That’s also how iNat treats them, and there is currently no iNat taxon equivalent to “bryophytes” (nonvascular plants) that contains all three phyla. In older books/papers, they may be all lumped together as phylum Bryophyta with mosses, liverworts, and hornworts being classes within that group.

[annkatrinrose]

@lappelbaum

Considering there are more “plant algae” obs than “bryophyte” obs

I’m getting more bryophytes than algae, looking at the numbers on the taxon pages:
“plant algae” phyla: 112,322 (54,672 Rhodophyta, 47,221 Chlorophyta, 10,415 Charophyta, 14 Glaucophyta)
vs.
“bryophytes”: 510,226 (449,249 Bryophyta, 60,123 Marchantiophyta, 854 Anthocerotophyta)

For comparison, there seem to be 97,879 Chromista, 99,712 Protozoa, and the next iconic taxon in size is the ray-finned fishes with 782,274 observations.

[lappelbaum]

@annkatrinrose

I’m getting more bryophytes than algae, looking at the numbers on the taxon pages:
“plant algae” phyla: 112,322 (54,672 Rhodophyta, 47,221 Chlorophyta, 10,415 Charophyta, 14 Glaucophyta)
vs.
“bryophytes”: 510,226 (449,249 Bryophyta, 60,123 Marchantiophyta, 854 Anthocerotophyta)

Oh, I see what I did. I accidentally included things marked as “Plantae” into my plant algae group. So there needs to be an “all other” group for these observations to fall into.

[annkatrinrose]

That would do it! When I checked earlier, I found ~500,000 observations at Kingdom Plantae level in the Needs ID pool - by far the largest chunk of all the current iconic taxa in need of IDs, well ahead of things marked Fungi at Kingdom level in second place, and “unknowns” in third place. In addition to that, there are also ~280,000 plants at Subphylum Angiospermae level in need of more detailed IDs.

[lappelbaum]

@annkatrinrose

three separate groups: 1. Division/phylum Bryophyta (mosses), 2. division/phylum Hepatophyta/Marchantiophyta (liverworts), and 3. division/phylum Anthocerotophyta (hornworts). That’s also how iNat treats them, and there is currently no iNat taxon equivalent to “bryophytes” (nonvascular plants) that contains all three phyla.

You could call it “mosses & allies” to be less confusing

[annkatrinrose]

Yes, “mosses and allies” and “ferns and allies” and “conifers and allies” might work better for a general audience, given that those are by far the most commonly observed plants within those respective groups.

[lappelbaum]

Sooo…
Flowering Plants
Conifers & Allies
Ferns & Allies
Mosses & Allies
Other Plants (basically algae and kingdom level IDs)

[fffffffff]

Would be interesting to know which groups are actually presented in “Plantae” observations, are flowering plants dominating because they’re more often photographed or it’s algae and mosses or ferns, because people are confused by them?

[annkatrinrose]

As someone who goes through Plantae regularly, there are usually a good number of very identifiable flowering plants in the more recent uploads, but it gets down to harder or impossible-to-identify for older records with a lot of photos of trees or mosses without the necessary details for IDs, messy vegetation with several species and no clear focus for ID etc.

@pisum

i think most folks are more likely to split plants into categories like trees, forbs, vines

That’s an interesting idea and I’m wondering what other folks think about this as an alternative? Given that roughly 94% of all plant species are flowering plants, that would still be a huge group if split along taxonomic lines, and doing it this way could split that group up a little further. However, it would be unlike any other groupings on iNat and would take a lot of work to sort out all the plant species into such groupings.

[pisum]

@fffffffff

are flowering plants dominating because they’re more often photographed or it’s algae and mosses or ferns, because people are confused by them?

it’s because flowering plants are more often photographed. when i look out my windows, everything i see is a flowering plant. i know there are ferns (resurrection ferns, ornamental ferns), conifers (pines, cypresses, junipers), and cycads (sago palms) around somewhere, but they are relatively few and far between. i know there are mosses, but i’m unlikely to photograph them in part because they are so small and in part because i know they will be difficult to identify to species without microscopy. i know there are algae, but i’m unlikely to photograph them because of the same reasons as the mosses, and also because i have to find a natural body of water that contains them (unless it’s terrestrial algae).

@lappelbaum

Flowering Plants
Conifers & Allies
Ferns & Allies
Mosses & Allies
Other Plants (basically algae and kingdom level IDs)

this is fine, but i question a casual user’s ability to use these categories effectively. even though plants with inconspicuous flowers or plants which don’t often flower, like oaks, grasses, yuccas, asparagus ferns, etc. are all flowering plants, given the categories above, i bet a lot of casual users would choose one of the other above categories for them.

ferns and mosses categories might be useful for their respective enthusiasts, but that’s a very niche base. are there even dedicated conifer enthusiasts? really, most people interested in plants are interested in flowering plants or all plants, and so carving out flowering plants from plants to me doesn’t really offer most people any additional benefit.

(compare that to the animal side, insect folks are and bird folks and reptile folks are large and distinct bases.)

@annkatrinrose

That’s an interesting idea and I’m wondering what other folks think about this as an alternative?

while i do believe that a lot of casual users, if asked “what kind of plant is this?”, are going to respond with something like tree, vine, grass, forb (plus fern, moss, algae), i think these form classifications are unreliable if you try to apply them in a mutually exclusive way, since some plants are both viny and tree-like, or grassy and forb-like.

so i am in no way endorsing that kind of classification. my point there was that your proposed classifications aren’t how most casual users would attempt to classify different plants. (compare that with what would happen if folks were asked “what kind of animal is this?”… i do believe most casual folks would respond with terms with correspond with iNaturalist’s iconic taxa, like bird, reptile, mammal, insect, etc.)

…

one last note: if you’re not already aware of this, it is possible in the website to search for multiple taxa together by setting parameters in the URL directly. for example, to find mosses, liverworts, and hornworts together, you could use: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_ids=64615,311249,56327

[fffffffff]

No, my question was wich group is dominating in “plant” records, @annkatrinrose answered it pretty well.)

[DianaStuder]

I can’t find the thread again - but when asked to add ‘trees’ or ‘algae / seaweed’ - iNat replied that doesn’t fit into taxonomy. Not going to happen.

[lappelbaum]

It’s because they are not taxonomic groups. You can have trees, bushes, vines, and forbs all in the same family (Fabaceae comes to mind). Also algae/seaweed is not a taxonomic group because they aren’t even all in the same kingdom. Kelp and some algae are already separated out because they are in the Kingdom Chromista.

[lappelbaum]

I guess what I’m most interested in seeing is a division of the giant green section of the pie (circle) charts. Everything else can be fixed by the way that you set up your search terms. What if the search box only had “all plants” as a choice but there were the groups like we discussed in things life lists and pie (circle) charts for people to see after the fact?

[sbushes]

@charlie

can we lump insects and all the rest back into animalia then?

Or how about we split insects too?

---

Insect comparisons aside, I support ways to delineate plants better in the system!