A common mistake when learning plants

From a conversation with Patrick Alexander.

... if you try to map written descriptions onto individuals, it’s difficult. If you try to recognize taxa first and assign names afterward, it works better. Most misidentifications seem to come from mostly seeing one taxon (in most of NM, Descurainia pinnata subsp. ochroleuca) and then trying to map the variation in that taxon onto the written descriptions (rather than saying to oneself: These probably all look like the same thing because they are the same thing. And that class of error is very common across taxa).

Posted on April 12, 2023 09:16 PM by crediblecorvid