Why the species field is sometimes blank

Most catalogues fill every field. This one leaves the species blank whenever the identification was not documented, and that decision is worth explaining because it looks like an omission.

The propagation problem

A wrong name in a catalogue does not stay in the catalogue.

It goes into a caption. The caption goes into a book or a page. Somebody researching that species finds the page, treats it as a source, and repeats it. Within a few steps the error is in several places and none of them cite each other.

This is not hypothetical; it is how most persistent botanical errors on the web began. A blank field cannot do that.

Why photographs are not enough

Grassland flora is the hardest common case. A great many species are separated by characters that are simply not visible in a photograph of a flowering head.

Grasses are separated by ligule shape, leaf sheath hairs and spikelet structure. Umbellifers are separated by bract arrangement and fruit. Hawkweeds and dandelions comprise hundreds of microspecies that specialists disagree about with specimens in hand.

A confident identification from a picture alone is frequently a coin toss between two species and occasionally between two genera.

What documented means here

The photographer recorded it in the field with the plant in front of them, or the site was surveyed and the record attaches to the location, or a specialist has confirmed it since.

It does not mean an automatic identification from a phone app. Those are useful for learning and are not a citable source, and nothing enters this catalogue on that basis alone.

Where a record has been confirmed by a specialist rather than only noted, the image page says so.

What to do with a blank

Write a caption that does not claim a species. "Grassland in flower, late June" is accurate and useful. A binomial you inferred is neither.

If you need certainty for publication, ask before you print. We will tell you what the record actually says, including when it says nothing, rather than reassuring you.

Corrections

If you know a name here is wrong, please say so, with the asset id and the character that decides it.

"This is not that species" is useful. "This is not that species, the ligule is blunt rather than pointed" is what allows the record to be corrected properly rather than merely emptied.