Identification Stats: UPDATE
It's been 10 weeks since the start of this project, and there's been a lot of progress since then! In those 2.5 months, 24,355 observations have been moved to research grade (348 every day on average). As of today (April 3rd, 2021) there are 354,696 verifiable mint observations in Continental US and Canada on iNaturalist, and that number is growing exponentially. The number of observations stuck at "Needs ID" has dropped from 97,123 on Jan. 21st to 82,516 today.
Here's a summary of the progress that has been made since late January. The arrows indicate the progress and changes in composition of unidentified/unverified mint observations.
| JAN. 21, 2021 | APR. 03, 2021 | RANK CONSTRAINED "Identify" LINKS | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RANK | # of Project Obs. Needing IDs | % of Project Obs. Needing IDs | # of Project Obs. Needing IDs | % of Project Obs. Needing IDs | (Click below to make some IDs!) | |||||
| = Family | 2,875 | 02.96% | 2,581(🡻) | 03.17%(🡹) | Obs. stuck at family level. | |||||
| = Subfamily | 602 | 00.62% | 551(🡻) | 00.68%(🡹) | Obs. stuck at subfamily level. | |||||
| = (Sub)Tribe | 1,641 | 01.69% | 1,496(🡻) | 01.84%(🡹) | Obs. stuck at tribe or subtribe level. | |||||
| = Genus | 34,362 | 35.38% | 30,227(🡻) | 37.08%(🡹) | Obs. stuck at genus level. | |||||
| ≤ Subgenus | 57,643 | 59.35% | 46,402(🡻) | 56.92%(🡻) | Obs. stuck at species level. | |||||
As you may have noticed from others' observations or your time spent outside, we're in the peak of a spring mint season. Lamium amplexicaule and Lamium purpureum are exploding out there among other exotic Lamioideae (Leonurus, Glechoma, Marrubium). It's not all exotics, invasives, and aggressives though. Some native Salvia species are in full flower, and Florida's endemic mints are starting off strong. Plenty of IDing to do if you're looking for a targeted curating task.
And please help with scoring phenology if you have the time. Only 14.44% of all 354,787 mint observations in the Continental US and Canada have been marked as "budding", "flowering", "fruiting", or "no evidence of flowering". If you want to see what some of the useful results of phenology scoring look like, take a look at what's been done with Florida mints.
