One of the perennial identification challenges in the world of invertebrates is the abundance of undescribed species. Many of these undescribed species are well-known, and they are often easy to identify in photos. But for one reason or another, they’ve not yet been formally described, in some cases despite being well-known for decades. Of course, iNat cannot add a species to its taxonomy just because “we all know about it”- it needs to be formally described first. So thousands of observations sit in perpetual ID-purgatory, despite everyone knowing “what they are”, because no species name is available for them.
My idea for organizing these observations is to make a series of traditional projects, one per species, to informally gather the observations or each one together, and then collect all these in a single umbrella project, which I’ve started here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/undescribed-lepidoptera-of-north-america
The uses I see are:
-users can check their observations in the umbrella project to get a quick “species count” of how many undescribed species they’ve observed
-when these species are described, adding the new ID will be simplified by all the observations that need the new ID being present in one place
-researchers looking for iNat records of a species they’re describing can see them collected in one place
-The individual projects produce “range maps” of the undescribed species for users to consider when trying to identify them
The main challenges I see are:
-what to do with the projects when the species are formally described
-determining how many observations of a new species warrant making a project for it- there are hundreds of “poorly known” undescribed species with only 1 or 2 observations, and these probably don’t all warrant a project. That would be impractical. The idea is to make a project for the well-observed ones, but what qualifies as “well-observed”?
You can see the 4 “trial” projects I just started under the umbrella project linked above, to illustrate how I see this working.
I’m wondering if anyone else has tried something like this, and if anyone has advice on how to do this efficiently. (The universal metadata tool allowing me to make a single-keystroke shortcut to add the observations to the projects from the Identify page was a lifesaver, and I don’t know if I would have had the patience for this without it, so yay for that!)
There are a few projects currently that are intended for undescribed species, but they have varying levels of curation and usefulness.
You might be interested in what @Megachile and the other gall-folks have been doing with undescribed galls, which sorts them quite nicely without needing to create a huge number of projects.
It involves an observation field that can be added, with a specific string for each undescribed species: https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/13979
This does work best with an external resource where people can look up the gall and find the right string to add, however - example https://www.gallformers.org
The downside of the project approach is that someone needs to go create a ton of projects.
The downside of the observation field approach is that either one person needs to keep on top of all of them and be constantly adding options to the drop-down menu, or it needs to be a free text box where anyone can put in any description they want (and hopefully there’s some reference so people know standardized labels to use for each species).
The first project is for a very specific undescribed group, that includes a reference to the paper that first put the light on it, as well as visual descriptions in the project journal. I also added a journal post for a museum specimen that I saw that looked consistent.
The 2nd project is more of a catch-all, there is another potential undescribed that I’m not as familiar with, as well as a couple of other odd-balls. I didn’t do as much with this project.
The purpose in my opinion for both projects is to act as a holding spot. If the species are described then I’d have all needed observations already separated and could add the proper ID’s quickly. At that point I’d just let the projects go dormant. I’m not going to delete them, as I think they would at that point still be fun to have.
I don’t have any pointers but curious on hearing from others as I’ve also set up a traditional project for this purpose - this is a ctenophore species Claudia Mills is working on describing that I have observations from and that I’d seen other observations floating around for: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/potential-feather-boa-cydippid-observations
On the one hand, having a project for observations of undescribed species (one for each or one that covers many/all) could be very useful. On the other hand, it could be useful to someone who wants to swoop in and describe a taxon he/she did not find or work on. So if you do this, you many not want to publicize it too far.