I love inat work but my health prevents me from getting out much. I’d like to start id’ing but I’m a little overwhelmed. Where should I start? I’m partial to plants of Hispaniola, or at least plants that have fellow genus members on Hispaniola, but besides that I don’t know where to dive in. I sometimes see what appears to be obvious id’s like dandelions or beggarstick but the I wonder if there are lookalikes to watch out for. I saw a sida today that lacked an id and wondered if I could figure that one out. There are 10 sidas on the island and they are all pretty similar. Where can I find a key for something like that? How do I find an easy genus to get my feet wet on?
That leads me to a suggestion. How about some of you that are experts in a particular genus share your knowledge and hand over a genus to people like me? I’d happily comb through a pile of those that need id if I felt the confidence to do it properly.
Unfortunately a lot of more obscure taxa/genera identification information is buried in journals, websites and books that can be kinda outdated or hard to find, but often they do exist somewhere! If nothing comes up in a thorough google search and pages of local taxon authorities don’t have linked resources, it’s definitely worth asking experts to see if they know of more obscure resources and/or combing local libraries etc.
One possibility would be to start out working through things identified as plant, vascular plant, or flowering plant, and ID them to family, skipping those you’re not sure about. In many cases, it’s not too hard to put things into Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Araceae, Apiaceae, Poaceae, Orchidaceae, etc. and those are then much more likely to get in front of the eyes of those who can take them further. You don’t need to go all the way to species to make a very useful contribution!
If you’re not sure where to start, you can help refine ID’s to the best of your ability by searching for things that have no ID at all (select the “unknown” category under the “filters” option, and that will help experts sort them from there. Even a basic ID like “Plant” or Insect" or “Bird” helps those observation get noticed by others.
A second way that you can help is to mark Research Grade but obviously cultivated specimens as “Captive”. These include planted trees and shrubs, indoor plants, flowers in someone’s garden or animals in zoos.
This is another easy way to hone and develop your ID skills.
Pick a taxon that appeals to you and make the phenology graph useful.
It is surprising how you can flip thru hundreds or dozens of photos - and one leaps out, that’s NOT … https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-identify-to-annotate-observations/1417
If you can, get hold of a field guide to plants of your area. Leaf through it. Get a feel for some families. Follow up interesting plant observations on iNaturalist.
Identifying unknowns to “plants” is a help. Identifying observations labeled Plants, Dicots, or Monocots to family is a big help.
Look at Research Grade iNaturalist observations for a genus or species that intrigues you. After a while, you’ll probably be able to recognize it well. Start in on Needs ID that have that name – are they correct? wrong? don’t know? Pay a lot of attention to disagreements or comments.
Pay attention to your notifications! You’ll learn a lot. Don’t worry too much about being wrong – we’re all wrong sometimes. If you’re wrong, just quietly withdraw your ID (or say, “I’m sorry” or “Oops” or “Thank you,” if that feels better). If you do think you’re right, explain; try to convince those who disagree with you.
Check the leaderboard for a species or genus that interests you. Click through to the profile page for the top few identifiers. If they’re recently active, especially if they’re working on Hispaniola, message them (one by one) and ask for information or for sources.
About dandelions: Just identify them all as Dandelion (Taraxacum) and go to Data Quality and click on “No, it’s as good as it can be.” Why? Because Taraxacum is a total mess with somewhere between 3 and 1000+ weedy taxa, not to mention the relatively few high elevation / high latitude natives. Just make them go away. (With 2 Dandelion ID’s, they can go to research grade as Dandelion.)
Learning about identification of any plant group is hard at first and then the more you know, the easier it is to learn more. Have fun.
People are pretty busy and most aren’t on the forum, and it’s a big ask to get specialists to “just” summarize all their knowledge in a handy package for others to learn from (I don’t mean this as a criticism about asking for that; just hoping to explain why things are the way they are). Some people have been generous and done that, and you can find helpful guides and comments scattered around.
But generally the most effective strategy is to choose a group and try to find the knowledge and experts where they already exist, do what you can with the available information, and then consult experts with specific questions. If you tag someone in the comments of an observation and ask for them to explain in more detail about something you’re confused about, usually they’re quite happy to do that.
If there are particular taxa you are interested in learning more about, that’s a great place to start. IDing should be rewarding for you!
Nowadays there is a lot of material available online, but if you get stuck, it’s perfectly OK to contact people on iNat whose IDs and profiles indicate that they have relevant expertise and ask specific questions to see if they can offer any tips. My experience is that specialists are generally happy to talk about their field of expertise and additional help IDing is welcome for most taxa.
For a beginner, a field guide is probably the most user-friendly way to get started – if one exists for your area. Hispaniola isn’t a part of the world I am familiar with at all.
A quick google suggests that this site looks might be a good starting place for finding resources on the flora of Central America: http://legacy.tropicos.org/Project/FM. I’m not sure whether it covers Hispaniola, but I imagine there is enough overlap that you can use it to follow up on specific genera.
Qualifications: I don’t know the context of this document. The journal it’s published in, Flora Mesoamericana, covers Mexico and Central America, and the author is based in Mexico, (based on googling them) so I suspect that there’s a decent amount of overlap. But there might be species on Hispaniola that aren’t covered there, and you’d have to find other resources on those species to distinguish them. Maybe there are Spanish sources my search didn’t find, or maybe you’d have to have to talk to experts or search in more obscure published articles.
This paper might help as well, I didn’t read past the preview but if you make a JSTOR account it will let you read the whole thing. It looks like it probably covers all the species, but it might not have much helpful ID info: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23909127
Hey, it is great that you want to help to identify. :D
I only really have two recommendations:
Don’t worry about it too much. Start slowly, skip observations, and ID what you think are confident with, and if you make a mistake, so what?
Check your notifications often (ideally at least daily). If you do make a mistake, or lose confidence in your ID, just withdraw it. There’s no shame in doing that and no harm done. Additionally, you will learn a lot through making these mistakes (at least I have).
The nice thing is that when you see more and more observations of the taxa you are interested in you will learn how to distinguish more and more species.
If you are afraid of lookalikes that you don’t know about, the “similar species” and “taxonomy” tabs on the species page are useful starting places into further research.
There are shared genera, and even shared species, although these tend to be the widespread Neotropical species. The Greater Antilles also have endemics.
You don’t need to be an expert in anything to get started. Helping can be as easy as filtering by “unknown” and getting observations into categories like “beetle”, “flower”, “mushroom”, or “mammal”. If say a mycologist is filtering by ‘fungi’, that mycologists will miss all fungi that are currently sitting under unknown.
Just want to wish you well on your journey! And please consider voting for this proposal which is about providing an easily-accessible place for exactly the kinds of resources you are asking for.
Here is how I ID plants (the way it was toaght to me in a course at UNI, we ID plants from botanical garden, so we were not familiar with them).
determine the family
Search for a checklist of that family in your region (or, the checklist of all vascular plants in your region)
determine the subfamilial groups (usually genus, but in big families, it is easier to go first to subfamily and tribes)
try to find a key for the genus in your AND adjacent areas. If they do not exist; any key. If not try to find some literature on taxonomy of the genus in question, to see what characters you need to look for, then try to match pictures and descriptions in floras and scientific works.
after you have a species ID; check against descriptions in floras, and against ecologies and known distributions. If it does match, you (probably) have the ID.
Lastly, search for the species name and genus with your area in google scholar, to see if any endemics have been described recently.
It is largely a skill in googling and sorting through tedious (old) papers, often in languages you do not speak (techincal terms are usaully understanable); the difficulty and confidence often depending on the ammount of literature available; but things do speed up as you gain experience.
To start, I would suggest choosing a family and learn to ID it.
orchids are usually a good starting point, as they usually have more literature available, and the genera are usually quite distinct (species not necessarily)
or some smaller dicot family (Sida is in Malvaceae, and the herbaceous members of that family should be manageable - not too certain how it is on Hispaniola though)
Often I say it’s a monocot or dicot. Ara tend to trip me up, as they are monocots but have net-veined leaves (except the duckweeds, which don’t have leaves). A gnetum would also confuse me; it isn’t even an angiosperm.
If a plant has flowers or fruit, I may be able to recognize the family. Pods are usually Fabaceae or Brassicaceae; brassicaceous pods have a septum in the middle, which is visible when they open, whereas beans don’t.