Why is "no evidence of flowering" included in the chart?

[annkatrinrose]

@tiwane

I’m not a botanist, but I think the annotations are most useful for showing phenology - when a plant is actively flowering or fruiting, so people can get a sense of when that happens how it changes by location or something. Showing evidence of non-active flowering will muddy those waters.

@bbk-htx

It should be marked as to what is occurring at the time of the observation, not what occurred in the past or what will occur in the future.

@sedgequeen

The persistent disagreement about what “no evidence of flowering” means suggests a need to clarify the wording. I know I have been confused about how to deal with last years old fruiting structures! How about, “no evidence of current flowering/fruiting”?

I get what you all are saying and I agree this needs clarification, especially as there also appears to be a disconnect between the original intent and how it is being applied by annotators. Maybe those who requested the “no evidence” option can chime in? The original intent appears to have been to use “no evidence of flowering” for observations that show only vegetative parts:

@bouteloua

The intent of the annotation, based on the community asking for it, is to identify if the plant is vegetative only (no evidence of current or previous buds, flowers, or fruits).

I think part of the problem is that “no evidence” is more of a DQA thing (as in: no pictures provided that show reproductive parts) vs. an actual phenophase like budding, flowering, and fruiting. So there are two concepts smushed together into this annotation, which leads to confusion.

@trscavo

I’ve written this elsewhere but the Plant Phenology annotation may be interpreted as follows:

• Evidence of flowering?
  • No
  • Yes
    • Budding?
    • Flowering?
    • Fruiting?
    • Other

Unfortunately, the implementation does not permit “other” so there are many observations that simply can not be annotated.

That’s basically how I understand it, too. I rarely add the “no evidence” annotation at all since I don’t find it all that useful personally. However, some people expect to be able to fit all Angiosperm observations into one or more of these categories and don’t like to leave things non-annotated. Hence “no evidence” is also being used for “other” in this key, which as I said before seems illogical to me. It kind of feels like polyphyletic lumping to me.

@silversea_starsong

This annotation option in my head should be the root default for all observations, unless selected otherwise.

The problem is unless it is your own observation you can’t select otherwise once it is on there, because “no evidence of flowering” is mutually exclusive of the others. Once it is selected, none of the other options are available any more. The only thing you can do is put a thumbs-down vote next to it and make a comment on the observation that you think the annotation is wrong. There are some feature requests to make annotations correctable and to apply community consensus to annotations.

Speaking of feature requests and to get back to the original topic of this thread (why is “no evidence” included in the chart): Since this annotation seems valuable to at least some of the community using it, but others feel it adds visual clutter, could this be addressed by being able to hide specific annotations? It’s already possible to hide observations with no annotations from the graph: