Joined: Oct 18, 2022 Last Active: Oct 10, 2024 iNaturalist
As of 2024-09-07 I will take a break from iNaturalist. If any two of my suggestions don't pass I will quit iNaturalist permanently. The main reason is systemic bias in iNaturalist's Computer Vision name suggestion model: I spend unreasonable amounts of time making manual corrections rather than helping users. If you'd like me to continue helping the iNat community with Ramaria and Phaeoclavulina observations worldwide, consider engaging with and upvoting the changes I will be proposing on the iNaturalist forums:
1) the version number of CV used must be recorded in the CV badge of an identification (link to feature suggestion on forums, please consider upvoting and engaging with this feature suggestion.
Suggestions that will be proposed in the future:
2) I need the influx of incorrect Ramaria formosa observations to stop which means that the CV model of Seeks must be updated (or preferably be kept up to date). The CV model of the Seek app is currently 450 days out of date (!!), leading to multiple different versions of CV being used concurrently. This is not documented anywhere which must be made more obvious. Here is a link to how this was discovered. Virtually all R. formosa observations are currently made with Seek and all of them are incorrect.
3) curators should be able to disable species of being suggested by iNat's CV. The most up to date CV model has an incorrect identification rate of P. myceliosa of close to 100% (!!!, link to data backing this number up and how it was derived . I'm estimation that iNaturalist's CV has lead to 3500 incorrect identifications of P. myceliosa and by proxy introduced an incorrect concept in North America of what P. myceliosa actually is.
4) less thought through suggestions: observations that are not reasearch grade and have been opted out of community taxon should never be used to suggest 'nearby species' identification suggestions. And it should be considered whether these observations should be hidden by default, both in distribution maps and under the Identification page.
5) less thought through suggestions: identifications made with CV of users with less than 150 observations should not count towards research grade.
I am interested in Ramaria. Due to the cheer number of Ramaria observation I review I usually don't comment on every single ID unless effort has been put into it. Feel free to tag or message me with questions and I'll be happy to answer or explain how to tell different genera or species apart.
Genera of coralloid fungi
If I have tagged your find as Gomphaceae it means that it's hard to tell if the observation belongs to the genus Phaeoclavulina or to the genus Ramaria. If I've tagged it as Gomphales it might be a Lentaria as well.
Commonly misapplied names
Ramaria formosa, Ramaria flava, Ramaria aurea and Ramaria botrytis are European species. Even though the names are frequently used in American litterature there is currently no evidence that they exists in North, Central or South America. An epiptype has recently been designated for each and they currently have no DNA-sequence matches outside of Europe.
Literature and notes by continent
North America - Pacific Northwest
The name Ramaria rasilispora is often erroneously used for any yellow Ramaria. Ronald Exeter et. al. has done a good job of describing it in the 2007 Ramaria of the Pacific Northwest which may be found free of charge here (link).
Ronald Exeter, Lorelei Norvell and Efren Cazares have done a good job of describing many Ramaria of the Pacific Northwest in their 2007 Ramaria of the Pacific Northwest book. It may be found free of charge here (link). Another great resource for PNW Ramaria is Danny Miller's project website (link), see Ramaria subgenus Ramaria and subgenus Laeticolora as well as the the pictoral key here (link).
Europe
The most up to date and authoratitave work on Ramaria is Franchi & M. Marchetti's I Funghi Clavarioidi in Italia (2022) link to reseller.
South America
New Zeeland
See this link for one of the most up to date taxonomic tree of Phaeoclavulina and Ramaria by J.A. Cooper. Also see 'The clavarioid fungi of New Zealand' (1988) by R.H. Petersen here (link).
Australia
Pat and Ed Grey have written a concise overview of many Ramaria in Australia: see A little book of corals (link).
Asia