Holding bin (plant) field index
This field is meant to represent the best ID complex when a plant ID spans multiple taxa. (IE: you know the plant is one of two or three species in a genus, but don't want to identify it only to genus, grouping it with many others). As with my other similar journal entries, i will gradually fill this journal entry with possible entries and links, until iNat has functionality to search and query from existing values.
Caulophyllum thalctroides/gigantea - they intergrade and aren't good species but somehow got split. Anyone surprised?
Lonicera morrowii/tatarica
Parthenocissus quinquefolia/inserta - can't really tell these two apart without tendril cups, or at least I can't.
Pinus ponderosa/jeffreyi - without cones these are difficult/impossible to tell apart in parts of California
Solidago altissima/canadensis - may want to add gigantea too, is the glaucous stem visible all of the growing season?
Polypodium virginianum/appalachianum
Carex vesicariae group - there are several Carex groups between genus and species that haven't been added to iNat, for now I am adding this one which I use often, in the future we may wish to add them more formally to the taxonomy.
Toxicodendron radicans/rydbergii
http://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/7184
(see also, for spiders: http://www.inaturalist.org/journal/arachnojoe/11424-about-the-field-holding-bin-spider)
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Awesome! Thanks for the consistency! Don't forget to update the link to this article found in the field description, as well as the link to the renamed article for spiders.
oh right, broken links! Should be all fixed now. Thanks.
Solidago altissima/canadensis
Hmm, I made one for amphibians (but since there aren't many in my region, the only pair I know about is Hyla chrysoscelis/versicolor). I did the drop-down option instead and it's nice because it autofills. It doesn't look like any of the others are set up as drop-downs. Curious why you went that route? You can easily update the values on the observation field edit page, right?
@bouteloua i haven't done dropdowns because I anticpated if this got broad use there'd be about 1000 of them and the dropdown would be more trouble than it's worth. i could try it. But I can already probably think of dozens of plat groupings... all of the sedge groups for instance, some asters, grasses, goldenrods, etc etc. Also I don't know if adding values to the drop down option resets or removes values in the existing entries, do you know?
even for natural communities, the dropdown would have >100 of them and that seemed like it would be annoying
The observation fields edit page definitely needs better UI. It shouldn't be a single field with items separated by pipes "|" . But it seems like without a standardized system it's going to be very frustrating if it is ever adopted by a larger group. Lots of little mistakes and near-duplicate values when anything can be typed into the box.
If you restrict it to a series of items instead of free text: When tagging something with that field, finding the item in the list should be easy because you can begin typing and it jumps to that alphabetically within the dropdown. This is in Chrome that I'm testing it.
Adding items to the list doesn't delete the data. Deleting an item from the list also doesn't delete the field from an observation. I tested it by adding "e" to mine and then deleting "e" from the list of available options.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/7187
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/7762104 ("e")
Oh thanks for doing that test! How many characters do you think we could stuff into one of those dropdown fields? I worry that it might get truncated at some point.
Looks like many thousands. It allowed me to enter over 8,000 fields accounting for over 26,000 characters of text.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/7187
Interesting. Consistency was the reason I set up this blog post which certainly isn't ideal. But I'm pretty skeptical of being able to manage a huge list of pull-downs too. We can try it if you want, as long as it won't delete existing entries...
Did you see my example about it not deleting existing entries? ;)
i did, that's why i said as long as it doesn't delete existing entries. (not annoyed, but it sounds that way). I generally prefer more control over less, and to me the pre existing fields seems like less control. But if all the other fields like this are being laid out that way, i suppose this one should be too!
Ok, i added all the values we have used so far as well as 'other' for placeholder, feel free to add other ones as needed. I hope someday they change it so we can import stuff with the enter key or at least a comma instead of how it is now (like bulk adding species to lists). I find the pipe key annoying.
Why am I cranky after eating lunch? :)
My misinterpretation. :)
I found it pretty easy to start typing the first few letters of the value/item to select it, even with a billion fields for this birds one I made http://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/7188
Seems to work ok so far. One of the things that seems like it may be annoying is continually having to add things. But maybe not. I do see when you have pulldowns it makes it somewhat easier to filter by them. I wish the would put the links directly into the interface though so i don't have to manually paste the URLs into that blog post. I also wish they would let us create iNat wiki pages for a field. I don't know why they won't let me do that.
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