Whats up with the “Type of Photo” field for plants?
The Type of Photo field includes only a few basic types of plants such as fern, tree, vine, etc. The category “annual/perennial” is our default catch-all for plants that don’t fit one of the other categories. We recently changed the default to “annual/perennial” from the former “flower”, which was even less accurate and an artifact of earlier days when the photo database was “California wildflowers” only. The Type of Photo is there for novices to use who want to make a query like “trees in Alameda County”. So it is purposely not very scientifically exact. We suggest that you use “annual/perennial” if your photo is other than a tree, vine, fern, etc. The category “unavailable” is being used for automatically-uploaded photos from organizations that give us large sets of images in bulk. Eventually it will be phased out.
