Identifier Profile · Kevin Faccenda (@kevinfaccenda)
Photo of Kevin by Jimmy Parker
In 2021, Kevin Faccenda (@kevinfaccenda) started walking the University of Hawai’i campus, collecting every grass he could find. Right outside the botany building, he found one that had never been recorded in Hawai’i (Urochloa glumaris), and he’s been working on grass taxonomy ever since.
Kevin studied invasive grasses for his PhD at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and his main identification focus on iNaturalist is grasses of the Pacific. Read on for more about his story, in his words! (Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)
“I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. My Dad is a horticulturalist, so we were always gardening together, which ignited my love for plants. In high school I joined the Nature Club run by Brian Suter and competed in the Pennsylvania Envirothon. Since I already had some experience with plants, I focused on the forestry section and learned the trees of Pennsylvania; I would go into the woods behind the school after classes with my copy of Plants of Pennsylvania and try to find as many plants as possible. From there my interests spiraled smaller and smaller into shrubs, herbs, ferns, grasses, Carex, and eventually, leafy liverworts (Cuspidatula labrifolia is an especially cool one if you’ve never heard of this group before). In college at Millersville University, I became involved with the herbarium and learned even more plants from the dried specimens. Chris Hardy is the curator there and his mentorship led directly to my focusing on more and more ‘difficult’ plants.”
“I moved to Hawai’i for graduate school and became involved with the herbaria there, especially the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, which has the largest collection of Hawaiian and Pacific plants in the world. I focused my research on invasive plants and eventually found about 70 new naturalized species for the islands of Hawai’i. I did a lot of fieldwork, both for work and pleasure, and any time I ran into a species I was unfamiliar with, I collected it for the herbarium or uploaded it to iNat. I’ve since graduated and moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, where I’m excited to be living in a place with significant Carex diversity; Hawai’i only has a dozen species compared to over 100 in Missouri.”
“I chose grasses because they are the most diverse family of plants in Hawai’i, with about 300 species, many of which are poorly understood. I initially wanted to study the ecology of these grasses but switched to taxonomy, history, and biogeography. The watershed moment that locked me into grass taxonomy rather than ecology was when I started walking around the University of Hawai’i campus in 2021 collecting every grass I could find, trying to learn the common urban species. I found a new weedy species that had never been reported from Hawai’i before, Urochloa glumaris. Since it was growing directly outside of the Botany building, I realized that there was much work to do on grass taxonomy and identification and proceeded to spend several years researching exactly that.”
From lifelist to research
“I started seriously using iNaturalist when I moved to Hawai’i to learn the flora and organize my photos and field notes, which is what first brought me to the site. In Pennsylvania I mostly learned through the written flora (Plants of Pennsylvania) but the equivalent version for Hawai’i (Manual of Flowering Plants of Hawai’i) was quite out of date, missing hundreds of non-native species, making iNaturalist a more comprehensive resource for non-native plants. I learn a lot through identifying other people’s observations. I regularly encounter species I haven’t seen before, and if there are high-quality photos, there might be enough information that you can key it out — or perhaps somebody’s already identified it and you can confirm that identification and learn a new species.”
“iNat helped me learn about thousands of species, although perhaps I spend too much of my time outside photographing things now. It’s difficult to go out in the forest and leave my phone in my pocket these days since I always feel like I might get an observation of some significance if I were to get another photograph. The FOMO of not taking a photo for my iNat pokedex lifelist sometimes gets to me.”
“I also use iNaturalist data for research and have published several papers using it for new records of non-native species, correcting identifications of misapplied names in the Hawaiian flora, species distribution modeling, and updating the full checklist of vascular plants of Hawai’i. I also have a website where I have maps of every grass that occurs in Hawai’i, most of the points mapped there came from iNaturalist.”
Grass blindness
“A lot of people throw their hands up at grasses because they’re a ‘difficult group’, but so are all megadiverse families. Asters are a much larger family and often just as difficult to identify, but I don’t tend to hear people dismiss them as eagerly as they dismiss grasses. Grasses seem to carry an especially strong and persistent stigma against them. As Howard Thomas said in Grass Blindness: ‘Some plants are born invisible, some achieve invisibility, and some have invisibility thrust upon them. Grasses are a case in point.’ I’m now in a position where I can identify many grasses rather easily. If I can get some people to pay more attention to grasses because they know they can get ID help from me, then I’m accomplishing my goal of pulling the cloak of invisibility away from grasses.”
“Grasses are the most ecologically and culturally important family of plants in the world. As in Isaiah: ‘All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.’ While I am not one to take bible verses literally, truly the majority of the calories we eat come from cereal grasses including wheat, rice, maize, oats, barley, sorghum, millet, and rye; or livestock who were fed these. There is beauty in grass and I hope more people can come to recognize it.”
How Kevin identifies
“The first resource that I usually check when I’m trying to identify a plant that I don’t personally know is the observations seen nearby on iNaturalist, using the explore page to scroll through the photos of the genus or family. Then I compare many photos for each species to get a sense of the variation within each species. If that doesn’t work, I’ll usually try a regional flora, like the Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawai’i, Flora of China, or Weakley’s Flora of the Southeastern United States and use the dichotomous keys there. I also try to use identification keys from those regional floras to learn identification characters in case some observations on iNat are misidentified.”
“Another resource I often use is Plants of the World Online. It has a Checklist Builder feature where you can enter any country or state and get a checklist of all the plants in the family or genus you’re looking at. From there, you can kind of brute force your way through this list, looking at photos on iNaturalist, or at herbarium specimen images until you find something close. Herbarium specimen images are super valuable as there are a lot of species missing from iNaturalist from tropical regions. I especially like the Smithsonian’s database, but I will also search GBIF using the filter ‘Basis Of Record = Preserved Specimen’ to get herbarium specimen images.”
How to photograph a grass
1. Full inflorescence
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2. Flower macro (spikelet side-on)
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3. Whole plant & habit
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4. Leaf collar & ligule
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For grasses and sedges, Kevin suggests always taking photos of at least four features:
- “The full inflorescence of the grass. If you put your hand behind the inflorescence that usually helps smartphones to focus. The CV is actually pretty decent with grasses if you give it a clear inflorescence photo. It does very poorly with leaves however, as would be expected given the importance of flowers for grass ID.”
- “A macro of the flowers as close as your camera can focus sharply. For grasses, try to rotate the spikelet so you are looking at it side-on and can see the zig-zag of the overlapping lemmas.”
- “A photo of the whole plant showing the leaves and the inflorescence all in one to get a general size and habit reference.”
- “The leaf collar region including the ligule. This is where a leaf diverges from the culm of the grass (grasses don’t have stems in the way that other plants do, so we use the word culm instead).”
And also … “Bonus but often not necessary: Rhizomes or stolons if present, leaf surface, habitat/landscape.”
Check out this example of a grass observation! —>
Kevin’s advice for new identifiers
“Be bold when you identify and leave your ego at the door. I hear from a lot of people who are kind of intimidated by identifying for fear of getting something wrong. Misidentifications are inevitable; I withdraw misidentifications nearly every day based on my notifications. I really appreciate these corrections as they help me learn about characters or species I may have never recognized before. Other identifiers are also usually very helpful to explain these things and I’ve had great conversations regarding observations that I initially misidentified. And if you are confident that an ID is wrong but aren’t sure exactly what the correct ID is, adding a disagreeing ID and pushing the community taxon back to the genus, family, or even further is very valuable to reset the identification process and hopefully get the erroneous ID withdrawn.”
“Community science has extraordinary power to connect people back to nature. In a time when most people live in cities and many people don’t know an oak tree from a hickory, let alone any sort of grass-like plant, getting people to pay attention and connect to the natural world is incredibly important. Given the scale of the biodiversity crisis we’re currently experiencing as we experience the sixth mass extinction, I hope that iNaturalist will help create a new generation of biodiversity-aware people who can advocate for the ecosystems that sustain us.”
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