Mission Briefing for August 2023 ID Challenge

MISSION BRIEFING

In this challenge we’ll visit “Darkest” [1,2] Africa. Over the course of the month, we’ll find out whether identifiers can make a difference for plant observations on this ecological diverse continent.

How are we coordinating the operation?

Flora of Africa is the collection project we’ll watch to monitor id progress over time. This contains all African Plantae currently identified from Tracheophyta onward.
Mission Impossible - Identify Plantae in Africa is the challenge’s traditional project. Its journal will provide updates. Observations placed into the project may be notable for their examples, discussions, mentoring needs or other features.
Mission Impossible - Identify Plantae in Africa is the present thread for freeform discussion, questions and general enthusiasm. Updates would be crosslinked here (so you don’t have to join the project to find updates.)
iNat IDathon Discord server is also available during the challenge for id discussion (thanks to @astra_the_dragon and @arboretum_amy for the help there)

What online resources are already available to identify African plants?

Flora of Africa’s single journal post has a rich collection of resources linked.
Guide to plant families of southern Africa has keys, potential application to other parts of Africa, and author(s) who are iNatters. (pdf access)

Which links will we use to identify Plants?

The links below are presented in “identify modal” format, and contain certain elements that you can keep or remove as you like. Notable elements of these links:

Flora of Africa project, for Tracheophyta and farther: &project_id=12505
All of Africa: &place_id=97392
Africa without the Cape region, excluding a “less dark,” higher observation count area: &place_id=97392&not_in_place=123067
Random sort, an easy way to access observations that are not the “newest” or “oldest” 10K. Refresh page for a new set. It doesn’t give a page count while in use (if you care). Remove from url to see current page count: &order_by=random
Observations per page, when set at 100 from default 30, allows quick estimate of progress outside of random sort (136 pages is about 13.6K observations): per_page=100
Grace period exclusion of last 3 months’ new observations, optional to add to link if you want: &created_d2=2023-05-01&createdDateType=range

I will use the following links to watch progress. Use any of these directly, or make your own to “choose your own adventure” for the mission! (Observation counts in K shown below are from Day “t minus 1”, on 7/31.)

Mission: Add them! These observations are not yet in Flora of Africa. Getting any observation from these links to Tracheophyta or better will add them to the project:

Plantae at Kingdom in Africa, 47.3K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape, 39.2K.
Unknowns in Africa, 21.1K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape 15.2K.
@jeanphilippeb 's Phylogenetic projects for unknowns contain many African observations, and are pre-sorted with the help of CV. Notable related projects include Trees 1 and Trees 2.

Mission: Improve them! These “slices” of observations are already in Flora of Africa:

Phylum through Class, 58.3K. NonCape, 39.5K.
Just Class Dicots (difficult or not), 29.6K. NonCape, 19.9K.
Subclass through Subtribe at Needs ID, 105.5K. NonCape 53.9K.
Genus through Complex at Needs ID, 338.4K. NonCape 139.4K.
Species and farther at Needs ID, 410.5K. NonCape 204.5K.

Side Mission: Tend Captive Plants! These won’t go to Flora of Africa, but you can still be a hero in helping to sort these out.

Unknowns marked captive in Africa, 10.7K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape 4.5K.
Plantae marked captive in Africa, 191.8K mostly Tracheophyta. NonCape, 82.9K.

Are there guidelines for identifiers?

Etiquette - current best practices
Limit notifications to others where you can.
Your notifications through site: When you id a lot, you get a lot of feedback. Your unread notifications are the count icon in the upper right corner of any inaturalist.org page. If you click the icon, they are presented in sets of 200 as a dropdown. If you click directly on one item in the dropdown, the whole list may be cleared accidentally. Try “control click” (Windows) or other means to send each item to a new tab without affecting the dropdown. You can “turn off agreeing notifications” to limit the simplest ones, although you may then miss experts’ comments along with experts’ agreements.
Your notifications through 3rd party: @pisum has provided a rich separate interface to replace the dropdown. Click through the authorizations to use it.

This example workflow provided by @dianastuder highlights other things to keep in mind (her posts below are linked)