Mosses of British Columbia not yet observed in BC on iNaturalist

Randal this is great! Can you explain what exactly is meant by "iNat system issue with Computer Vision and Geographic Model", please?

also cc @earley_bird if he has a better understanding on how to delimit autosuggestions by geography.

And cc-ing @bcollis @brittney_the_botanist @ryan_durand @tyson_ehlers @andyfyon @shanebustapbj as people who seem to get to higher altitudes and eastern and northern climes with some frequency-- if you are about 2000m or in the northern boreal or alpine tundra zones, there are lots of mosses waiting to meet you.

Automated suggestions on iNat are restricted by geographic occurrence within reason, where "restricted by geographic occurrence" means our statistical model of where taxa occur (the geomodel) thinks the taxon should occur nearby. You can learn about the geomodel at https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/84677-introducing-the-inaturalist-geomodel

Sometimes spatial predictions are going to be wrong if there are a bunch of misidentified observations, and the way to correct them is to add better identifications to those observations. You all seem to be doing a reasonable job of that in BC.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we are always changing the way automated suggestions work, e.g. by regularly updating the models, and sometimes making big changes to the overall system, like introducing the geomodel in Fall of last year. So when you look at an obs like https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/137480056 and see that the Palustriella commutata ID was added from automated suggestions, that was using a different vision model and using a different definition of "nearby" that wasn't statistical like it is now. If I look at the current automated suggestions for that observation, I don't see Palustriella commutata in the list.

Thanks @kueda for the clarifying comments. Some of these east coast IDs might date back to older iterations of the ID system. @johndreynolds see above.

@bradenjudson I should try and annotate this list of mosses not in iNAT BC observations with region and habitat, but that could be a while off.

@earley_bird thanks for remembering the keystone alpine bryophyte observer

@rambryum Thanks for making this list. I have found several species in your first list (at least 6 from a first pass of the list, possibly more) but I have not created iNat observations for them. This is something I can work on later in the spring. I don't always have field photos, and a lot of species just get identified in 'grab bag' samples with others when I'm back at home with a microscope.