Diario del proyecto Illinois Botanists Big Year 2020

Hi! Looking for an indoor activity? I thought it would be cool to look at flowering phenology trends on iNaturalist observations in Illinois over time, but to do that, we need to annotate those observations as to whether they have flowers budding, flowering, or fruiting.

You can head to the Identify page, click on one of the cards, and select the Annotations tab at the top of the page.

From there, use keyboard shortcuts to make annotation go quicker!

p then u to mark it as flowers budding
p then l to mark it as flowering
p then r to mark it as fruiting
p then n to mark as not budding, flowering, or fruiting

Wait a moment for it to save, then press → the right arrow key to move on to the next one.
Dicentra cucullaria by @sedge

A few points:

• Remember that some plants can be both budding and flowering at the same time, or even all three! So you can annotate an observation with all three options.
• It's a bit confusing, but there is no need to additionally press the "Agree"/thumbs up button after you add the annotation.
• Try changing the sort order from newest first to oldest first, or even random.
• Still stuck? Here's another tutorial and longer page about annotations, but also feel free to ask questions in the comments below.
• Have a question about a particular example? Use the comments below to link to them or feel free to @ tag some local plant nerds like myself in the comments on the observation.

As of 29 March 2020, there are:

1. 1,576 observations of "spring wildflowers" unannotated in Illinois for the months of January - March
2. 18,763 observations of "spring wildflowers" unannotated in Illinois for the months of January - May
3. 184,871 observations of all flowering plants in Illinois that are unannotated (and 14,000 are annotated!)

Happy annotating!
—cassi