Diario del proyecto Most Photographed Trees of the World

Making a new project for a tree has become practiced and smooth. Easy workflow.

The issue is that a lot of trees that are documented elsewhere have not been observed on iNat!

I tried for some time to get a few trees in Russia documented, to no avail. Another user shared a site with me about notable trees in Russia and after going through quite a few I was not able to find one that I could cross-reference with any trees that are on the site. I did add one tree that I found through Wikimedia Commons. I also added one found in Crimea, Russian-occupied Ukraine. But it's a pretty big landmass to go empty on the map.

I do need to add more trees for North America. They are well documented and I have put it off because I know there are going to be lots of photos. Currently I only have a few on the west coast. I want to focus on trees in other parts of the world as well, and I don't want USA to be over-represented.

I'm learning a lot of weird details, too. Did you know there are two 'Prison Trees' in Western Australia? One has some historical basis, and the other one sort of inherited the story. The trees look similar, but you can tell them apart with some close study. They are close enough together that the GPS coordinates overlap (this may be due to bad GPS signal or logging the location wrong).

I will keep this project going. We have 1 new member which is exciting. I'll add another journal entry when I reach 25 or maybe 30 trees.

After a couple false starts, I have a system for adding trees to this project.

The original goal was to create a set of rules which would automatically scrape all the individuals and place them in a collection project. That quickly became too unwieldy. I had to create KML files for very specific boundaries. Even still, if there were species listed that happened to occur within another boundary, it would scoop those up too. So I abandoned that version.

Then I thought I could collect notable trees into a traditional project. It was promising, because it gave me the ability to add only the individuals that I knew were the specific trees I was after. But I had to add all the trees in the same traditional project which made the search tools useless.

Finally I made traditional projects for each tree. That worked, and I found that it has a lot of benefits. I can include information on each tree under their separate project pages, which makes everything more organized. There is a useful search tool that helps me find observations not yet in the project. The umbrella project contains a map, a leaderboard, and links to each individual tree project. Additionally, if I happen to come across an existing project for a notable tree, I can add it to the umbrella project rather than rebuild it myself.

I currently have projects for eleven trees. Each one is quite a bit of work! I have to cross-reference maps and articles before I can narrow down the location for each tree. I restrict the taxon to genus and by doing this I have caught a few observations that are lacking species ID or are misidentified. It's a lot easier to identify a tree when you're looking at the same one over and over!

If I can find a single observation of a notable tree, I will create a project. If there are no observations of a tree I have read about on Wikipedia or elsewhere, I let it go (for now). Each project has a link back to the umbrella project for ease of navigation.

Unfortunately, it does not stay up to date automatically. I will have to revisit the individual projects periodically to add new observations.

Is this a worthwhile project? Great question! Nothing quite like it exists yet on iNaturalist, and the tools make it so easy to do, I decided to do it myself. There is something about collecting numerous observations of the same organism that I find interesting. It is also a conservation project that I hope people get invested in. Charismatic megaflora!

Please feel free to suggest additional trees that should be added to the project. I can do it or help you add it yourself.