This is not related to your question but I think you will find it helpful. I notice that your form starts with a repeat popup which can be strange to users. I bet you would prefer to start immediately with your questions and only ask after one plant has been identified whether the user wants to add another. If so, you can do that by removing jr:template="" from species_repeat directly in the XML. You can do this as the last step after you have converted your form and before you upload it.
For the curious, jr:template makes it possible to have default values for repeats that users can override. By default XLSForm makes all repeats this way. More at https://opendatakit.github.io/xforms-spec/#default-values-in-repeats