I am posting this because we want to clean up a species that the community thinks should be cleaned up (and also we cant decide which to clean up next)
When i say “clean up” i mean adding annotations such as life stage, sex, plant phenology, etc (There are a shockingly high number of observations that have not been annotated)
If you have an idea on a species that needs to be “cleaned up”, please let us know by posting on this topic the species name, observation count (global) and why you feel like it needs to be cleaned up.
It would be useful to know which types of critters the project team is knowledgeable about. That might narrow down the range from a very large number to a slightly smaller number.
You should do the bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare) or some other thistle. It has 65,323 observations and cleaning it up would help with how commonly thistles are mis-identified.
For me personally, i deal with plants and insects (Mostly plants)
Just post anything that you think is important.
we do extensive research via observations, scientific articles, etc before we attempt to tackle a species so that we lower the risk of making false annotations or false id’s.
Spiders - esp. Araneidae - are pretty easy to learn (I could also help pointing you guys in the right direction if you want) and you could do basically any Argiope spider … maybe Argiope trifasciata (~18.000 observations) yould be a nice start, as they are distributed widely and thus it would impact a huge variety of observations worldwide.
I personally would also love Agriope bruennichi :-)
You mentioned helping to point us in the right direction? sure! we need all the help we can get
more users = more annotations and more misidentifications found
I think most folks are going to thing “cleaning up” means correcting misidentifications. Would recommend that you stick with “annotate” if that’s the goal.
Everyone has their favorite taxa, so I don’t think there will be anything resembling a consensus here.
Whenever I don’t want to put in much thought, I’ll add plant phenology (blooming, not blooming, fruiting) to species that I like.
If anyone wants any of the Russula mushrooms that are red and ID’ed to species without detailed annotation and/or microscopy cannot be put to species but still tens of thousands of observation like R. rosacea are put to species cause of CV.
I know that this topic is more focused towards annotations, but I feel that Trachemys species around Costa Rica (and probably around the rest of Central America) are pretty frequently misidentified. I’m only aware of CR misidentifications, but between the three species of slider that can be found in the country (T. venusta, T. grayi, and occasionally, T. scripta) many research grade observations are incorrect. It appears that many observations IDed as T. venusta are actually T. grayi, and sometimes the other way around. I could be wrong, however, but I am basing my information in that T. venusta has a postorbital stripe that reaches the eye and that the first vertebral scale is longer than wide as opposed to T. grayi.
Phenology annotations for Asarum canadense! There is an impending taxon split, see here: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/603109 It will be helpful for identification purposes to have flowering status if the split goes through.
When it comes to annotations, pretty much everything needs to be annotated! As of the time of writing, I’m using plant phenology as an example: there are 46,182,711 (verifiable) observations of flowering plants (Angiospermae), but only 4,776,654 (verifiable) observations of flowering plants with plant phenology annotations. So almost 90% of flowering plant observations are missing them.
This view is pretty interesting, because it shows the most-annotated plant species, i.e. species that have been the focus of past annotating efforts.
Oh no… yeah im not doing roughly 40 million observations on my own. If i attempt something like that, it will only be because i have many people in the project. Currently there are only 4 people in the iNaturalist Annotation Effort