Fine-tuned Observation Comparisons

As of this writing, there are 1,325 species of fungi documented in Michigan. This number is likely inflated by singletons - species that have only been observed once and therefore may be a result of misidentification. For whatever reason, I was unable to see species with fewer than four oberservations in the Michigan Macrofunga Project page to suss out these singletons and other rarely observed species. My dilemma was solved when I learned about a handy iNaturalist feature: the compare tool. I wanted to bring this tool to everyone's attention because it seems so useful! (Note, however, that at the bottom of the page iNaturalist warns that this tool is experimental and may be removed at any time!)

This tool works by entering two or more queries. Each query filters all the observations in iNaturalist by some criteria that you specify, and then lists species that are shared or not shared between these different lists. So maybe you want to compare the different polypore species you've found relative to all the polypores found in Michigan? The first query would include the taxon number for Polyporales and the project name for Michigan Macrofunga Project. The second query would include these same two filters (assuming you were interesting in only looking at your observations made in Michigan) as well as your user number. So for myself, the two queries would look like this:

• taxon_id=47380&project_id=michigan-macrofunga-project
• taxon_id=47380&project_id=michigan-macrofunga-project&user_id=1180604

I can see that I've only documented 14 of the 87 species (as well as some groups at the genus level) in Michigan! If I want to compare observations of Polyporales in Michigan to all Polyporales species in the world, I can simplify the queries as such:

• taxon_id=47380
• taxon_id=47380&project_id=michigan-macrofunga-project

Now I can see that we have documented 84 species (maybe a few at the genus level) in Michigan out of the total of 681 species of Polyporales listed in iNaturalist. I can then sort the species in Michigan by number of observations to find the singletons. There was one observation of Laetiporus huroniensis, which looks like Laetiporus sulphureus but grows on conifers. It seemed to me like this one observation was misidentified given that the forest floor was coverd with deciduous leaves. There were also a few species with inactive names that never got synonymized. A few singletons are indeed good species. A species with one observation, Fibroporia radiculosa, is one that I found at a professional foray and was identified by a polypore expert Hal Burdsall.

I hope this small demonstration showed how useful this tool can be for comparing your own observations as well as aiding in identification of Michigan mushrooms!

Publicado el agosto 12, 2020 11:46 MAÑANA por aldendirks