I would really appreciate advice on how to obtain verification and interact with the experts.
I am a novice when it comes to verifying the various Fauna and Flora. (sub-categories e.t.c.) and as I cannot currently contribute to several Research Grade observations, as required, are unable to gain information I require.
I’m working with various endangered species organisations with their research on the critically endangered Juliana’s Golden Mole which I have on my property. The current geotagging stats indicate they have only been located in the Bronberg area in Pretoria, South Africa.
I apologise if this isn’t relevant to the discussion, or wrong platform? Will appreciate advice on where to post this, in order to get information locations the mole has been sighted.
Your observation of Julianas Golden Mole is the only one (and thus first one) on iNaturalist at present.
You can post some queries on your observation asking for more information: any specialist visiting the observation will then contact you.
As you can appreciate there are very few experts in such a small group. So please dont hold your breath.
There is also (not on iNat) the African Eutheria Group - http://www.afrotheria.net/ - which should be the best place to look, and where you will probably get your best feedback.
A lot of tasks, all of them useful and recommendable.
But I think the very most important of all is broadly IDing unknowns, outstanding in its central significance. If the specimen is not IDed at all, then all the other attributions and tasks won’t matter for this observation. Even a wrong ID is better than none, because in this way the falsely alerted experts will single it out and in most cases leave the correct broad ID for the right experts to find.
So, if you don’t know jack, then at least ID unknowns to “Bird”, “Mushroom”, “Plant” … literally everybody recognizes those. Up to your personal level of knowledge you are an expert. Noone needs a trained ornithologist to tell an ostrich from a chicken.
… come to think of it, this makes me wonder why the option for leaving an upload at “unknown” even exists in the first place. Causes a lot of trouble.
Bird and mushroom yes - I see prompt response to that.
But plant - there are 9K for Africa (which I try to work thru - but that daunts me)
Plant identifiers filter for family, and no one looks at the obs trapped in Plantae. They are better left in honest Unknowns than sadly trapped in Planty Limbo. Unless your location has more active identifiers available?
Well … at least they’d have tried, then. And maybe it provides a few identification amateurs with the opportunity to ID “plants” down to order or family level, where they can be taken over by the pros.
Being a trained botanicist myself, I sure would also filter broadly for plantae … well knowing that all people can tell a mammal from a bird, but not necessarily a fern from a dicot. (Just adding, I don’t ID plants right now, because I am fixated on marine uw life at the moment.)
I think this is why plants get stuck in limbo: there are so many of them all around, and they are not running off, which means the process of observing - photographing - uploading “plants” is very easy, like catching fish from a barrel really. But they are difficult to ID even to a higher taxonomic rank, and all in all there seem to be less experts (save for iconic stuff like orchids, of course).
In my opinion IDing an observation as “plant” makes sense, since they can be defined as a monophyletic group and rather easily identified if you exclude the green alga. Come to speak of it, there’s much more trouble with broadly pre-identifying “alga” imo, even the macroscopic ones.
Yes it is very easy to pick all the plants out of Unknowns. Orchid, fern, moss, 19 out of 20 are mostly dicots. But then nothing happens … ever. It is more satisfying to add IDs that trigger notifications and go somewhere.
Like this one flagged for missing species. Success!
I think the “nothing ever happens” may be location-specific. I always check Plantae at kingdom level along with the unknowns for my area and I feel it has been picked over so many times that I’m having a hard time finding stuff to ID unless it’s new or recently ended up in that pool due to ID conflicts (e.g. liverwort misidentified as a moss).
It’s definitely a local thing, here something happens, and even “plants” is an enough id, though I try to get dicots or family/genus where I know them.
Yes, I’ve been expanding to neighboring states and also started doing more confirming IDs on species where I feel confident enough since that’s the largest chunk of the Needs ID pile.
Yes - thanks to the link you put up, I check Kingdom disagreement for Cape Peninsula, Western Cape, and Rest of Africa. Broad planty IDs but only for the Cape Peninsula. Once the backlog was cleared, there are only ever a few each day.
There’s a thing anyone can do, mark observations of Arctium leaves as “can’t be improved”, for that you need flowers or seeds, but there’re many thousands of observations with 2 ids of genus, photo of a leaf, those can’t be ided further, and need that mark (leaves theoretically can be ided by leaf stalk, but there’re many hybrid plants, so better to leve genus). Can’t speak globally, but for Eurasia that is so.
Unless the observation is at the seashore and is a brown alga. A lot of people think that those are plants. And the problem is compounded because some red algae (which are plants) are brown in color.
If you stumble upon observation with two ids of Chrysoperla carnea complex, please mark them as good as possible, they’re not idable by photos, but very common and there’re hundreds of already ided by experts and agreed by another user, still in need of id because it’s a complex.
Relatedly, I had an earlier post where I was thinking to build a starter/coarse key of some kind. I could not ultimately find a good resource to make that sketch into a kind of usable diagram.
But seeing that @graysquirrel has made a useful wiki out of this thread, could a similar wiki/thread be set up for a “coarse id’ers’ guide” that people could add to? Maybe it could be in the form of some kind of question-style key, like for starters:
-Does it look like it’s made of plant tissue? if so go to (link below or some subsection notation)
…animal tissue? fungal tissue? (and add simple cautions where necessary, like about algae or slime mold or galls or various underwater things- “just call it Life for now”)
I’m just a chemist though, so there are probably people here way more informed on how to do this kind of key thing.
Just had someone tell me that the unknown I identified as a flowering plant was certainly not a flowering plant. That person then identified it to the species level and the species was, actually, a flowering plant. I responded by pointing out that her identification was of a flowering plant and she told me that it was too much of an overgeneralization.
We might be able to get some things done if there weren’t people who were discouraging us along the way! LOL! Only joking. One of the hazards of bureaucracy is that there will always be people working at cross purposes, and yet, not much gets done without bureaucracy.
I did note that she joined in 2020, so she has been on iNat for slightly less time than me. I did tell her (in a comment) that I was doing what iNat staff had requested and why. I also suggested that she check out the forum.
I did not check her stats other than when she joined. Perhaps I will do that. BTW, when I pointed out that the observation was a flowering plant, she responded with the overgeneralization comment and said it could, perhaps, be applied to annuals or perennials. I didn’t bother to tell her that her ID of the observation was of a broad leaved evergreen tree, which was, therefore a perennial. I think she was referring to herbaceous plants and I’m not looking for a fight.
These questions reflect your dedication to the education of people on iNat, and having benefited from that myself, I thank you for it.