I wanted to reach out to the community to discuss a topic that has been on my mind recently. I understand that this forum isn’t primarily for identification purposes, but I’m struggling to find a suitable platform with a broad audience for discussing an identification issue involving two similar species. If you know where should I post please feel free to tell me.
In case anyone knows, the species in question are the Red Percher (Neurothemis ramburii) and the Indonesian Red-winged Dragonfly (Neurothemis terminata). These two dragonflies share striking visual similarities and have overlapping distributions, making them prone to confusion.
What has prompted me to raise this concern is the noticeable lack of comments or discussions differentiating between these two species in iNaturalist observations. I worry that many of the identifications made so far might be based solely on previous identifications that could potentially be incorrect.
If you are referring to my knowledge of the two species then no, unfortunately. In fact, the intention is to create a discussion with IDers and experts.
While I could reach out to some of the IDers I often encounter on iNaturalist, again, many of them may have based their identifications on previous, potentially inaccurate IDs. Therefore, I believe it would be more effective to conduct this discussion in a single, unified discussion.
If you have other suggestions, it would be very appreciated.
I think the first go is to ask the identifier how he got to the ID and what are the distinctive features to look out for. If you assume that all identifications are based on other maybe wrong IDs, we can forget the whole system of iNat.
You might try to set up a discussion on the Nature Talk part of the forum. Like any other specific identification issue, this is so tightly focused that it might not attract many people to comment. Or at least might not reach the people with knowledge. At the same time, it might become a big, bloated discussion of everyone’s favorite identification challenge – there are so many!
Tagging people on the leader boards for this group is a good idea. Experiment. Tag one person for a few observations, tag someone else on a few different ones, and see who gives useful information. Then see if you can cooperate with that person (or those people) to clean up this mess.
You might also consider writing a carefully polite and informative paragraph about the problem and pasting that into all the observations in the area of overlap. See what happens.
Hello, @sedgequeen, I appreciate your thoughtful response. My initial strategy involves tagging and copypasting, although I’ve noticed in the past that sometimes these actions can go unnoticed, and I’m conscious of not wanting to spam everyone’s notifications. However, considering your input, I’ll give them a shot since they seem to be the best route. Thanks a bunch!