Amount of "Unknown" records is decreasing

What is the approach to landscape or other photos that don’t focus on a specific species?

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I don’t know what the preferred action is, but personally if there’s anything clear enough to ID I’ll slap one on, even if it’s just “plants.” If it’s really blurry and I don’t think anything in it could ever be reasonably IDed I’ll just mark it “No evidence of organism.”

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That’s the method I’ve been using too (trying to be constructive with the user instead of “downgrading” their obs whenever I can).

One situation I find trickier is when the observer, either in the placeholder or the comments, puts something like “Cedar Creek” or “Justin’s Marsh”; it would go against the user’s intention to identify an organism their… so maybe just tick “No evidence of organism" (even though there is, technically, evidence because most of the time you can see some plants)?

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Finally got through the 1,000+ that were in Wyoming!

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After all that work I decided to move on to North Dakota, and quickly knocked out the 3 unknowns there, lol

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Chose one.
If the observer says - no - I wanted the bug not the flower, or whatever - change your ID to follow their choice. Observer wins, if they tell us what we are looking at.

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I typically do the “no evidence” thing in those cases because it preserves the likely “memento” purpose of the record.

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This makes sense!

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Nice! I’m practically done on my side with a 600 miles radius circle around Eastern Kansas, which covers a large chunk of the central states. There are large chunks left in Minnesota and Colorado (~4000 each), plus a terrifying ~15 000 in TX, if you are looking for some specific states to go through ;).

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I did Nebraska and now moving to Montana. I’m originally from Texas so once I finish Montana maybe I will just park myself on Texas and make it my mission to bring that number down.

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Why do the “state of matter life” observations come up as unknown in the filter? Why do observations that have conflicting identifications come up as unknown in the filter? If there a way for me to get a return for only observations with absolutely no identification?

Are the “unknown” numbers (260,000) including all the “state of matter life” observations @tkoffel?

Because a search for ‘unknown’ is actually in technical terms a search for records which have no iconic taxa attached to them. This includes some things like bacteria as well as ‘life’ which by definition cant be assigned to an iconic taxa as these are children of the overall life classification.

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I can understand that. I guess I am slightly annoyed I can’t produce a list of observations with no assigned identification. I can’t really do anything with the current “state of matter life” observations that get mixed in with the pure no ID observations. Just adds unwanted time to the process. Guess I’m just venting as it seems there is not a solution for it.

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Add &identified=false to your url
Ie (note this is filtered to Canada)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6712&subview=table&iconic_taxa=unknown&identified=false

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Outstanding! Thank you! @cmcheatle

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Thanks to your link I have recovered some of my own lost obs and added IDs:)

It seems that if the ID is missing for whatever reason, the obs does not appear in its Collection Projects, which is where I pick up most of my errors and omissions. Is that working as intended?

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Now I cant find that link again to do my remaining 4 or5…help please?

If you’re looking for your own observations that do not have IDs, try this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&user_id=kaipatiki_naturewatch&place_id=any

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Thanks! I will try to remember that

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