Is there any way to prevent
palm? for the TREE
going to
PALM
as the first option.

Many palm obs start off wrongly identified as birds and that PALM is why they are misdirected.
I understand it is valid and useful for birders, but not as a first option for (newbie) planty people.

Interesting. When I type PALM in the search bar at the top of the page, I get, in this order:

Liliopsida
Geometroidea
Geometridae
Palmchat
Arecales
and finally - Arecaceae

When I type it in "suggest an ID" on an observation (whether of a bird or a plant), I get Palmchat first and Arecaceae second.

Is that also what you see, Diana?

I don't know how these names are prioritised, so I defer to site staff to say whether anything can be done here, such as adjusting priority of lexicons - @tiwane?

The AOU four-letter codes are simply the first four letters of a bird's name, in cases where the name is one word, so I doubt it's possible to change that.

There do seem to be a surprisingly large number of cases of this happening. It might also be people uploading photos where "palm" is in the description metadata, and automatically matches https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?taxon_id=7434&category=maverick

The mavericks are just those where there have already been enough IDs to turn the Palmchat maverick, and where it hasn't been withdrawn. There must be many more that have, for example, one palmchat and one palm ID...

This link might be better. Has an ID of Palmchat, but that is not the current community ID: https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?taxon_id=7434&current=false

Here are all observations with palmchat identifications but an observation ID of something other than palmchat—over 100 observations, the vast majority of them palms by the looks of it: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?ident_taxon_id=7434&verifiable=any&without_taxon_id=7434

Given the demonstrated ability of this 4-letter code to cause issues (as well as that 1. it's probably not exactly a super commonly-used 4-letter code and 2. it doesn't take typing many more letters for palmchat to appear without the code), it may not be a bad idea to simply remove the code in this instance (similarly to the code MOTH for mountain thrush, which seems to have been deleted over a year ago)

Another solution would be adding singular "palm" as a common name for Arecaceae (which would then presumably be listed first when typing palm, since there are far more observations of Arecaceae than of Dulus dominicus)

Removing the code "PALM" for palmchat seems a pragmatic solution