Flag for Taxon: China Rose (Rosa chinensis)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| je9h | China Rose (Rosa chinensis) |
CV suggests Rosa chinensis for almost any double-flowered rose, most of which are complex hybrids, not describable as a particular species. |
Jan. 9, 2020 20:31:02 +0000 | Not Resolved |
Comments
I found a interesting paper:
https://bangladeshbiosafety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Biology_of_Rose_Au.pdf
Rosa chinensis s.str. is a wild species from the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Hubei and Guizhou.
Only the original chinese wild forms of this taxon should be called Rosa chinensis in my opinion. These plants are probably found almost exclusively in botanical gardens outside of China. Of course, it should be noted that modern rose hybrids are also cultivated in China for the most part, which have little to do with this species.
Although Rosa chinensis is an important original form, there were around ten different species involved in the modern hybrids. Not all species are involved in every hybrid and of course the proportion of the respective parent species varies greatly depending on the cultivar.
So you can only summarize these hybrids very roughly as Hybrid tea roses. Unfortunately it is also not possible to summarize these cultivars with the scientific name Rosa × hybrida as it is done in the paper, because Rosa × hybrida Schleich. is a synonym of Rosa × polliniana Spreng., a natural hybrid of R. arvensis × R. gallica that has nothing in common with garden roses:
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:732856-1
There are also:
Rosa hybrida F.Dietr., a synonym of Rosa bipinnata Dum.Cours. (unplaced name on POWO)
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:2970321-4
Rosa hybrida Vill., a synonym of Rosa pendulina L.
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:732855-1
Rosa hybrida E.H.L.Krause, a unplaced name on POWO
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:732857-1
Rosa hybrida Tratt., a unplaced name on POWO
https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:3257175-4
At the moment I have no simple solution for this problem and so I often simply change the identifications for many "Rosa chinensis" back to Rosa and then mark them as cultivated (unless they have really escaped cultivation, which is usually not the case for this group of cultivars).
It's just a minor note but I would add that this applies not only to hybrid teas but also to floribundas, grandifloras, shrub roses and various other hybrid rose classifications.
Yes, thats true... I usually make no difference between those, its all just a wild mix of species. :-)
Why doesn’t iNat make it so that “Rosa chinensis” is completely disabled from the CV suggestion list? I doubt that CV has made a single correct identification of R. chinensis and it serves absolutely no purpose to allow CV to continue incorrectly suggesting Rosa chinensis for thousands of photos of various Rosa hybrid cultivars. Given the current state, CV will never be able to “learn” how to correctly recognize Rosa chinensis and it is currently responsible for spreading a huge amount of misinformation. Anyone who is actually capable of correctly IDing R. chinensis would also be intentionally choosing R. chinensis from the species pick list, so removing this name from CV’s suggestions would not affect more valuable observations.
@je9h Yes, I also think that it is relatively unlikely that the plants that have been identified as Rosa chinensis really are this species. But I am not really able to identify them.
There is a wild form called Rosa chinensis var. spontanea that occurs in Sichuan, Hubei and Guizhou but the "real" Rosa chinensis var. chinensis and Rosa chinensis var. semperflorens with double or semi-double flowers are both of cultivated origin in China. These old cultivars are unlike most modern cultivars where many different species are involved. Rosa chinensis is naturalized in several countries according to POWO. All three varieties are not accepted, POWO only accepts this taxon at species level.
A specialist is probably able to identify cultivated and wild occuring forms of R. chinensis. It makes no sense to use the CV suggestions to identify these plants because there are more than 30.000 different Rosa cultivars, and only a few of them can be called R. chinensis. On the other hand R. chinensis is probably the most important parent species of the modern hybrids, that is why modern hybrids are unfortunately often given the prefix Rosa chinensis in the literature.
The safest way to take a picture of R. chinensis is probably to take a picture of them in a botanical garden like the pictures/drawings on POWO: https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:732029-1
@loarie Does it make sense and is it even possible to remove Rosa chinensis from the Computer Vision Suggestions?
there's 10k obs of it so it would take some ID disagreeing work https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?locale=en&place_id=any&preferred_place_id=1&subview=map&taxon_id=133614&verifiable=any
It would help going forward. Every year results in the addition of what is probably hundreds more hybrid cultivar roses misidentified as Rosa chinensis. I see that someone has spent a lot of effort marking many if these as “Casual” but the problem remains that they’re still misidentified and the general public won’t be dissuaded from this knee-jerk misidentification so long as CV keeps suggesting it.
I am pleased to announce that after over three months of intensive identification, I and other users who have been doing this for five years (including oxalismtp, je9h, terit, alexiz, graysquirrel, zzravizz, blue_celery, kai_schablewski, and peakaytea), eliminated almost all incorrectly identified Rosa chinensis observations from iNat :D
It took some time because I tried to review all observations carefully and add annotations and explanatory comments.
I hope that thanks to this, in the next update, the CV will learn to identify R. chinensis more correctly.
Currently, on iNat there are a minimum of 32 observations of true Rosa chinensis (mainly the cultivated variety 'mutabilis'), just over 100 probable observations of R. chinensis (observations from mainland China and Taiwan, about which I am not sure and do not have the knowledge necessary for proper verification), and unfortunately, about 60 incorrectly identified observations whose ID cannot be changed because users have opted-out of Community Taxon and do not they intend to change this (I'm worried that they will still have a negative impact on iNat's CV - I don't know if such observations are taken into account in AI training or not).
Wow, well done!
North America alone:
-currently 55 research grade
-236 needs ID
-4988 casual grade
even if we undertake the rough going of a time to clean up the 300ish verifiable obs, it'll fall pretty solidly under the "For plants: large amount of planted (casual grade) observations that remain incorrectly identified" common theme among computer vision errors https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/computer-vision-clean-up-wiki/7281
ouch