I stayed up til 2AM the other night so I could finish reviewing the final pages of unknowns in California! And then when I woke up there were 14 more pages of unreviewed ones… I think I have my work cut out for me.
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I follow up on most. The few exceptions: Lately I’ve been removing the follow flag right away for mixed species in multiple photos, and for very obvious fungi. I also have a flag for “maverick” listings in case I miss any.
I wish I had a good workflow for reviewing the notices. I would love to have a button I could push to show me anything I IDd that was subsequently contradicted rather than having to wade through those in which I marked “plants” and someone else subsequently confirmed “plants.”
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You can change it in settings, disable agreeing ids.
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Ah! Thank you so much.
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I was going to post that it looked like the momentum had slowed a little, and to put out a rallying cry… but in 11 days the number of unknowns has decreased by about 15,000, so it looks like things are still on track! Maybe when we get to fewer than 200,000 we could all throw a party (individually, maybe a celebratory cup of coffee and pat on the back) :)
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Ah, I did wonder about why it included viruses too.
The local “Unknowns” has gotten hard for me to make much progress on (there are still a number of plants I could move to monocot/dicot, but that gets a little mind numbing), so I’ve started to look at observations at the Kingdom level and moving them down(up?) the taxonomic ladder.
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Have you tried looking at another location? You might be surprised if you look at somewhere with a similar climate to yours how many genera and families you can recognise. I like looking at global observations to mix up things up a bit too.
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I usually look at my state, nearby states, and region. Sometimes I look at the state I grew up in. I certainly haven’t completely exhausted the list, but I’m finding it rewarding to identify things to the species level from Kingdom when I see a familiar organism, which was getting harder in unknowns thanks to everyone’s hard work in getting IDs on the low hanging fruit. :)
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Hey peeps,
NPS representative here (conveniently after hours), I’d love your help going through National Park Service unknowns.
Here’s a link to the identify page for NPS units across the country.
Also, because I’m always a fan of shameless plugging, join a project at a park that’s close to home! I’ve made a project for every unit in the NPS here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/national-park-service
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…and if anyone wants to do Canada’s National Parks unknowns(167)… 
Or, for a little intercontinental flare, if you would like to wrangle unknowns at a yet to be completed World Heritage Natural Sites project. (1,239)
Not a rep nor do I play one on TV…but very incredibly grateful to those that serve as such.
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I have found that explore on the phone app is a fun way do the region near me. I might go out as far as Tennessee and see what I can quickly identify. Once I recognize the observations as all mine I know I’ve worked my way to home again. Kind of like Bilbo’s journey There and Back Again.
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Hey peeps,
That was easy… We went from over 2,000 unknowns to <200! You all are the best. Now if only there were an easy way to get all 600,000 ‘Needs ID’ observations to research grade…
Anyways, thank you!!!
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I’m glad we helped, but I still see 20 pages of unknowns in your link. How are you getting those numbers?
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I see 18 pages. @parker_hopkins do you have a default place set on your viewing preferences? I know I do, so I have to take off for that link to turn up any results at all.
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I’ve looked through what felt like a lot of the NPS Unknowns, though they’re a small percentage of those out there. There are good reasons a lot of them are unknowns! And some day you should try to recruit botanists to ID the many I could just call Vascular plants. But some were fun to put names on.
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@erininmd @arboretum_amy I definitely had a default place set on viewing preferences. I guess I learn something new about iNaturalist every day!
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We’ve stabilised at around 1,500 unknowns for a little while now, though it did briefly dip to around 1,150 a couple of weeks ago.
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Have you been having complaints about your removal of unknowns? Some guy’s about to rip my head off for calling his trees plants, saying that he doesn’t appreciate it, I’m not helping, and there’s a reason he left it unknown.
He’s seeing things from his speciality’s perspective thinking it’s going to be harder for him to get IDs on his photos because there will just be too many plants in the plants category for his to be seen. But I’m thinking from my perspective and if no one sorts out some fungi for me soon, I’m gonna run out of local organisms to ID. I just wanna keep improving things I see, no matter what it is. It’s the best way.
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