It seems like knowing how plants are affected by non-cyclic phenomena such as droughts is at least as useful as tracking changes in seasonal leafing and flowering times. They aren’t biologically separate – plants can only respond to stress in a limited variety of ways, so “dropping leaves due to drought” may look very similar to “dropping leaves in the autumn”. A particularly wet or dry year will also affect the timing of the seasonal cycle.
The area where I live has experienced several very dry years and unusually warm autumns and I’ve been making a point to record spring-flowering plants that uncharacteristically bloom a second time in late summer. This is stress blooming, not seasonal blooming, but I don’t think it would make sense to have a separate annotation for this – the anomalies in the phenological charts reflect a variety of climate and weather phenomena, not just the changing of the seasons.
yeah, if it’s autumn and a tree that i know is changing color, i’d annotate it but if i found a dead leaf on the ground in summer when i know the tree is likely otherwise green, i wouldn’t. But if i find a standing tree with dead leaves because it’s sick, stressed, or dead, i’d annotate that as such.
If the added annotation about leaf colour is so unclear that various power users are each having to offer their interpretations of how they would or would not use it, how is this a helpful field? Is there no actual set of guidelines from the administration that would actually explain how the various options in the field are intended to be used?
i don’t think it’s particularly unclear, though a written protocol could be helpful. I think power users are just finding edge cases, as with anything else nature related
I love the new plant annotations, thank you so much for updating them! I have a few questions that hopefully someone can help clarify.
If an observation only shows a just-opening flower bud, should one just not annotate, since neither “At least one closed flower bud” nor “At least one open flower” seems to fit? Or is this a discretion/best judgement type of situation?
Since choosing “no flowers or fruits” prevents you from choosing all three other options, shouldn’t this be “no buds, flowers or fruits”? Also, some species (thinking of spicebush (Lindera benzoin), but also magnolias) develop next year’s flower buds in the fall, and I’ve noticed some instances where a spicebush has been annotated as “no flowers or fruits” when it has flower buds. This is understandable: they are pretty small! And people don’t expect flower buds so early. And it’s technically correct, there are “no flowers or fruits.”
This wouldn’t be a problem if “no flowers or fruits” didn’t prevent voting on the other flowering options, but as it is, the only way to make those annotations accessible is to message the original annotator to get them to remove their annotation. So maybe that’s one argument for why “no flowers or fruits” shouldn’t make the other annotation values inaccessible.
That is how we improve the quality of the data on iNat. Each sweeping our own pedantic way thru. (Disappointing, OED does not know where the word comes from)
Yes, thank you @sedgequeen. I totally agree since I got confused when I was a beginner and I didn’t know whether to choose “green” or “colored” leaves. Y’all should name it like “autumn color change” or something.
Yes, I completely agree. I’m glad someone has my psych. Please do bring sex annotations back. There are plants, and/or flowers like she said, with their own seperate gender. This data could be useful in finding out the potential ratio of male-to-female plants or flowers. Like, say you want to find how many more male plants or flowers there are then female plants or flowers [just an example since there are usually more male plants needed to pollinage female ones.] Then, those annotations would be useful, wouldn’t they?
That’s when that data comes useful. I’ve always wanted to see how many more male plants there are then female ones. Just the ratio. That would be fun (and potentially useful to y’all botanists, conservationists, or other scientists in that field.) I really think you should add that. A little goes a long way. Wouldn’t you agree, y’all?
Not all places have autumnal/seasonal leaf color changes. We don’t here, for example. Leaves definitely change color due to lack of water, though it can be because the soil is too shallow for the root system.
Question: I have seen lack of pigment leaves occur as well, in an entire plant, prior to its demise. (I assume this is due to (lack of) light or soil deficiency.) The leaves become palest yellow-green. Would this annotation be applicable?
I would use it whenever the leaves are ‘normally green’ and now they are not - for whatever reason.
But the leaves whose normal colour is not green - what shall we call those?
Definitely a choice for leaf peepers with autumn colour expected.
When I hover the annotation on a computer it clearly states “At least one green leaf or needle (or reddish if this is the normal healthy colour)” vs “At least one leaf or needle has late season or drought colour”. ‘Healthy leaves’ might be a better name, but the meaning is specified.
What I was wondering was about using ‘Green Leaves’ on observations of sedges/restiads/etc. where someone was kind enough to pay actual attention to the leaf sheath, honestly. It would be less about the plant and more about the observation, and it might just be really confusing (leaf sheaths are generally tiny brown things after all) but they’re also important…
Yes, “on a computer.” As in on a PC or Mac but not on the app or full website on a tablet or phone, which makes it confusing for some users since the pop-up caption is not visible on such devices and not easily found by some users on PCs and Macs. Following is an example of green leaves that are arguably actually coloured leaves but some users might reasonably mark them as green, especially if they only add annotations on a tablet or phone. See my observation of Rhamnus cathartica leaves at https://inaturalist.ca/observations/254062562 . Perhaps if the pop-up caption is added to the tablet and phone apps and clearly visible (without need to access it through hovering the mouse cursor) on the website, the terms, Green Leaves and Colored Leaves would be clear to the vast majority of users.
what about an annotation for Seedling or Mature plants?
there are several species of plant seedlings that look completely different than the mature versions.
recently I have been adding many annotations to orchid observations I have near me, and I had this thought. Oftentimes at seedling stages, certain plants can not be ID’d to species (Epidendrum a good example).