No shade_tolerance / root_depth_minimum

[matheoberger]

Hi, I keep doing researches on the API but few characteristics seems never appear (shade_tolerance or root_depth_minimum seems always equal to null). I tried for phacelia, sorrel, carot and few other vegetables.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to 'https://trefle.io/api/species/104914?token=L0I0bG0za25sTE1CVnl1bzdsYnBDUT09&164822'
2. Search for root_depth_minimum
3. Appear null

Expected behavior A string variable which complete the plant characteristics.

Screenshots

Additional context I hope these are only particular cases but I still not get anything else than a null value for those characteristics.

[charitygrace]

There's definitely a lot of data missing (and I'm only looking at plants in the US), but it comes from data missing in the original sources that were used to populate Trefle. I believe the only source populating Trefle in the USA is the USDA and the USDA database is certainly missing a lot if you look directly at it.

Basically for Trefle to become useful to you/me, "we" need to figure out how to populate it better, but I think the Trefle developers are a bit overwhelmed. Currently the only way I see to improve the data is to submit data for each plant using their form. This will not work for me and they haven't responded to my offer of scraping websites and passing the data along to them.

Hope that clarifies another person's experience with Trefle.

[matheoberger]

@charitygrace As a french person, I've been able to scrap some data in french which could be also traduct in english for their DB... I was hoping the trefle DB would be more usefull than my little scrapping algorithm. It seems not for the moment.

[charitygrace]

@matheoberger I was thinking maybe the data would be better in Europe as the APIs listed as being used by Trefle are more from there, but yes, I'm now considering how to scrape the data I want >10k plants without getting my IP blocked.