Enabling Research on Flowers, Fruits, and Leaves
Each time you post an observation of a plant, additional data can be collected for the study of phenology—the timing of events like flowers, fruits, and leaf color change.
Now, you can annotate all observations of vascular plants to indicate evidence of leaf buds, leaves, seasonal color change, or no leaves.
This is what the options look like on an observation of a vascular plant:
Also, we’ve simplified the annotations related to flowers, fruits, and seeds. The appropriate option(s) should be selected based on the evidence provided in the photos.
If you hover over the options with your cursor, you will see the definition. You can also review the definitions in our documentation.
On taxon pages, by default you see a chart of overall seasonality. Take a look at the Japanese Maple. If you add a place filter in the upper right to restrict it to Japan, you can see that it is most observed in April and November.
If you click on “Flowers and Fruits” and hover over the points on the chart, you can see that April has observations in all four categories: flower buds, flowers, fruits or seeds, and no flowers, fruits or seeds. Note: the chart settings offer the option to “Hide ‘No Annotation’” which was selected here.
If you click on “Leaves” and hover over the points on the chart, you can see that November has many observations with colored leaves.
It is hard to strike the balance of broad applicability and useful specificity for almost 400,000 species of plants. Although many species do not fit nicely into these categories, the goal is to provide a useful starting place for most species of plants. We worked closely with other phenology programs (USA National Phenology Network and Budburst) and phenology researchers to develop and revise these terms.
iNaturalist observations have already been used for many studies of plant phenology, such as the impact of climate change on the wood anemone, spatial and temporal gradients in flowering phenology across Europe, and anomalous Yucca blooms across southwestern North America. Increasingly, researchers want to access more data by using machine learning to label fruits, flowers, and leaves based on a set of training data. With 8 million annotated and verifiable angiosperm observations (out of 71.8 million angiosperm observations), iNaturalist is a massive and growing source of data to understand plant phenology. Now with the ability to add leaf annotations, we can make 76 million vascular plant observations more useful, too.
These updates were supported by a collaborative grant from the US National Science Foundation to advance plant phenology research through the creation of Phenobase. Phenobase will aggregate plant phenology data from many sources using the Plant Phenology Ontology to maximize data interoperability, in addition to using machine learning to infer phenological stages from photos. The Phenobase collaboration involves the USA National Phenology Network, University of Arizona, Louisiana State University, University of Florida, and the Chicago Botanic Garden.
To learn more about adding annotations, you can review the definitions in and a tutorial about using the Identify tool to add annotations quickly using keyboard shortcuts. Now you can see on your profile how many observations you have annotated. Thank you to everyone who annotates observations!
Comments
Great ideas!
If you want to add
Leavesannotations, here's an Identify search that will show you all verifiable Tracheophyta observations lacking aLeavesannotation, sorted randomly: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=any&quality_grade=needs_id%2Cresearch&order_by=random&taxon_id=211194&without_term_id=36Be careful, some budding leaves will be reddish on some plants, so take a moment to look at the observation date.
I really like this change and look forward to seeing the new graphs of leaf phenology as annotations get added. Now, if only observations were allowed to have two standing annotations for sex at once, since the vast majority of angiosperms have both male and female parts present on a single plant, at least during some point of the life cycle. (e.g., one single plant observation could be annotated as male and female).
When adding fields that populate annotations when uploading observations, do you know why the field 'Flowering Phenology:' categories 'fruit' and 'flower' populates the respective annotations but the 'budding' category does not populate the annotation?
For example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/224505242 and https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/224505250 vs. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/223414940.
Is there a way to fix that? Or is there an alternative field that would populate all the annotations accordingly? Thanks!
Tony, this is totally a side note, but I love that ability to sort searches randomly. What a great way to provide a very visible link but reduce redundant effort by showing everyone who follows that link a different subset of records.
cool!
@danlego plant sex annotation was intended for dioecious plants. Separate male and female plants.
Coloured leaves is for autumn. Or drought. Surely that confuses phenology?
This is awesome and direly needed! Well done iNat!
very cool!
how cool!
Awesome!
Fantastic! Thank you!
Awesome!
great
I'm not sure but at a quick reading this is biased towards cold climate Northern hemisphere deciduous plants. @dianastuder's comment about drought also applies to many monocots, ferns, as well as Eucalypts and other Dicots in Australia.
Thank you iNat and much appreciation for all endeavors to streamline and expand phenology observations.
There is no one size fits all with our natural systems and the more responses posted the more interesting the challenges are to record plant phenology across the global ecosystems and plant communities.
@ carrieseltzer I appreciate your overview; I understand that the SEASONALITY graph is when the species is most observed (greatest # of observations posted), a “seasonality of observations”. Is this an accurate perception?
Much appreciation ~
If "No Flowers or Fruits" is incorrectly or accidentally selected, then no one is able to select the correct annotation, but can only agree or disagree. This assumes that if "No Flowers or Fruits" is selected then it is correct.
Please note that - autumn or drought - is in the mouseover text for Colored Leaves.
(Not MY choice or interpretation)
Surely Drought should be a separate option if it is for phenology ? And it will be a different Not Green colour for sorting the taxon pictures.
This is so cool! Going forward, I want to be more consistent about annotating my observations, and the phenology annotations will definitely motivate me to take more observations of plants!
One thing I noticed is that you can note whether a plant has flowers and/or flower buds. You can also note whether a plant has colored leaves and/or green leaves. In either case, this acknowledges that they can be occurring in the same time. However, for animals, it seems that you can only note that an animal is adult or juvenile, even though there are plenty of observations that have adult and juvenile animals in the same photo/observation. What does iNaturalist recommend for the time being when annotating animal observations that have adults and juveniles in the same photo? The same goes for photos with male and female animals!
Cool! Gonna go annotate some of my more interesting plant obs
Is the Green Leaves annotation restricted to deciduous plants and phenology for autumn leaves?
Very nice addition.
Wonderful!
Documenting flowers, fruits, and leaves on iNaturalist is a great idea! It's a wonderful way to contribute to our understanding of biodiversity and share the beauty of nature with a global community. Your efforts in highlighting these aspects help in promoting environmental awareness and conservation. Keep up the excellent work!
Excellent. Where I live there is only one native deciduous plant, the deciduous beech (Nothofagus gunnii). We pay a lot of attention to "The turning of the fagus," and people go into the mountains just to see it. Its seasonal patterns are well-documented, but it's nice to annotate it in iNaturalist too.
@tiwane, thank you for showing how to construct a search URL, or I would have missed some.
@mhughes26 iNaturalist observations record encounters with individual organisms, so in this case pick one as the subject of the observation and annotate it for that subject. You can duplicate the observation for the other individual if you want.
Love this! I've been religiously adding annotations to plant observations in my area and am thrilled that there are more options for plant phenology.
Sorry - I did. Copypastaed to the right one.
Great! It'll be exciting to see how this gets used to build automated suggestions on phenology, and used for research.
I'm wondering for "colored leaves", could there be a short parenthetical on (fall/seasonal/drought-induced) change in color, since it's probably not widely understood that it's intended for color only due to seasonal or environmentally-induced leaf drop?
Overall, I'm really happy with the addition though, very important to have for climate change science.
I would like to see more annotations. Seeding fruiting and live/dead for tree species.
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