A good activity. Recently, I tried to clean up a few species too and learn a lot more about nature. I’m looking through the grasshoppers of my country. When I click “View More” , I get a collection of records of the same species. It is often that unrelated species pops up in the collection. This is due to the uploader added several unrelated organisms into one observation. If the organisms are the same species, there may be problems annotating the sex sometimes because it is in one observation. Some annotations may never be filled, and there is no need to be obsessively thinking about it. I say that to myself constantly too. I’m spending too much time.
I started in my country SG, and move to the neighbouring countries in South east asia. What motivates me is the ID count probably haha. I don’t make alot of annotations, just IDs. I might add the sex, and stage of growth sometimes if I know. I go through the collection and a few mysterious species pops out.I may use Google Lens to look into those species, so that I can get it to where it belongs. If not, I identify it as “grasshoppers” or some higher level classification, and try to go back to it on another day if I can remember I had seen it.
I went from Malaysia, Indonesia to vietnam, and entered China. The Taiwanese got reference website maintained by insect enthusiaists. There are picture reference website in Thailand online. Accurancy may not be always there but there are some pictures. There are some pictures from HK. For a big country like China, there are numerous species, but Google does not have a lot of records of chinese grasshopper pictures. Can’t find their scientific papers. Found bits and pieces here and there. Grasshoppers are a lot more complex, and I might have made a few mistakes.
Yes, it is easier to work with what you know. but one can learn new stuff. It is easier to have a reference. It is easier to work with some genus than others. As the species count in a genus increase, there is bound to be some without much info searchable online. For example, I work with one species called “Pseudoxya diminuta”. I’ve found a lot of uploads under “Pseudoxya”. There is only one species in this genus, so it is a straight forward, I just key in as Pseudoxya diminuta. The hard part is the species is variable, and close to the Oxya in appearances. I went through like a hundred pages to pick out the Pseudoxya diminuta specimens from the Oxya. Then I found more in Oxyini. I can’t go to the “grasshoppers” because that will be a very big collection. If I filter by country, I can catch a few Pseudoxya diminuta in their “grasshoppers” collection. so it is fun, and also a time waster. A lot of unknown grasshoppers pop up. I have not touched the grasshoppers from America and Africa, Europe. I’m devising ways to save time and increase productivity in identifying.
I think it might also be useful to add annotations to organisms that have not yet been identified to species. For example, annotate Lepidoptera for life stages so e.g. someone knowledgeable about caterpillars will have a chance to select specifically observations with that annotation for adding IDs. Similarly, annotating Angiospermae for phenology could help sort for unidentified plants in bloom, which might be useful as many field guides rely on flower characteristics for identification.
sure… I meant wrt annotations though
I would mostly want to filter for leaf-mines just in the UK or just in Iceland
I annotated some with tracks but I think far better would be to have mine as a recognised annotation
I was going to suggest annotating galls as well
great idea @annkatrinrose
I work on red Russula as I see them, but usually I see them left at genus level and I mark them as “as good as it can be” so they go to RG. A concerted effort would be nice.
I always do these two when IDing
Caterpillar (because it helps to trigger prompt IDs for Lep)
And Fruiting, because I use that filter to find useful pictures.
Methodically adding annotations to my own obs now.
If I ever run out of tasks - I might go thru Leucadendron, to annotate for flowering and male or female. Since that matters.
There are plant obs carefully annotated by newbies with their own gender - since they don’t understand that their observed species has both male and female flowers - and shouldn’t have a sex annotation at all. That should be a short list? But we can’t correct annotations. I leave a comment … to deafening and confused silence.
I would suggest something out of NA for the fairness of it.
I agree, having an annotation for leaf mines would be good.
In the meantime, you can filter for mines in a country by adding both the project and the country to the observations filter in Explore or Identify; e.g. for UK mines:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6857&project_id=leafminers-of-europe
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?project_id=61115&place_id=6857
Yes, for dioecious plants annotating sex can be very useful and even the basis for research projects (I wrote a journal post to make that point). Unfortunately, there is no option for bisexual/hermaphrodites - only “male” or “female” or “cannot be determined” - so it ends up not applicable and very confusion for most flowering plants.
Maybe i’ll put a feature request asking to put “bisexual/hermaphrodite” as a sex.
There’s a looooong thread about annotations, where I think this has been requested multiple times. There are related feature requests as well, like this one.
Sorry - but for my confused newbies - it needs to be quite clear.
iNat is asking about the observed plant. Not the confused (non-planty) observer.
- Yes
- No
0 voters
The northern cardinal is a well-known species that does need to be annotated (89,380 observations are unsexed, 93,210 observations are not life staged, out of 149,546 observations globally)
??4??
Read the first post, it’s a group of dedicated users.
Yeah, we don’t have many members, Not many people are interested sadly.
As a group, we do roughly 800 observations a day (With me doing 400-500 a day) It may not sound like much but we have already done roughly 1750 observations since the project was created 3 days ago.
We do need members, if you are interested contact me on this forum or on iNat.
Currently, we are only focusing on birds and animals. However if we get enough members in the future we might consider starting increasingly-specific side-projects for certain plant species, bird species, mammal species, etc. For example a side-project that only focuses on 3 common plants that are not commonly annotated or a project that tries to annotate all flowering plants (Not likely, we would need hundreds of members to even consider that!)
I have been working on the Plant Phenology for Crataegus for quite a while now. I have gone through the southeastern United States so far and have not marked them as reviewed. I have not tried to keep a count of how many I have done. It looks like there are around 75,000 left to do.
Do you consider yourself an expert in Crataegus?
Not at all. Only reasonably knowledgeable on the more common ones in my area. Not sure there are very many who would claim to be experts on the entire genus.
Crataegus is one of those genera that may be impossible to sort out to species level, at least here in the Appalachians. I tried to key one out once and gave up - too many of them, plus hybrids, too. Many require a close look at both flowers (to count stamens and observe color of mature anthers) and fruits (in some cases dissection) to attempt a guess at species. I may try again after collecting observations at different times of the year for the same tree. Anyone knowledgeable enough to ID them based on the typical iNat pictures would be some sort of Botany Superhero. For those who want to give it a try, here’s a key for the southeastern US and a key for New England.