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In the short term, it may be as good as an ID you’ll get, but over time other experts will find your observations and others will become educated on how to ID the group in question. Physical specimens in herbariums and insect collections can sit for years and years before being sorted and identified by relevant experts. It would be great to have way more experts on iNaturalist, but quickly agreeing with the few experts that are on iNaturalist does not solve that problem.
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If an expert is really the only person who can ID something and that expert isn’t publishing or sharing objective diagnostic criteria that allows others to make identifications then their expertise means nothing. Science is about sharing information.
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Exactly. If an expert IDs your observation, that’s great, you have your observation ID’d to your satisfaction. At this point, ask yourself what you gain by clicking “agree”. You’ve gotten your answer from the expert and it’s been recorded. I trust the experts too! I just don’t click agree unless I review some keys or something to at least rule out similar species.
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We need better guides and keys and these need to be shared more broadly. It would be cool if this could be built into or linked from iNaturalist taxon pages: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-an-interactive-system-to-glean-diagnostic-features-from-identifiers-and-show-them-to-observers/3225