Anyone who wants Journal updates on the ID-a-thon can join the project here.
Journals will include formal rules, rankings updates, helpful resources, maybe more.
Participants do not have to join the project – if you win something, you will be tagged.
Spectators / non-participants are welcome to join.
It’s not fully polished yet but it will be in time for the start of the competition.
I’ll begin contacting people who have expressed interest in joining some time this week, to confirm their participation, poll on the additional category, etc.
I have a question, will the competition start on January 1st on each local time zone, or will there be a common start? (assuming eastern US time as it’s usually the default for these sort of things)
All times will be as determined by the API. I don’t actually know what time zone that is. I should probably look into it, but for now all I can say is that I honestly don’t know. In any case, the prizes are of no real value, so I wouldn’t worry about a few hours either way.
I do live in the EST zone, and one of my co-admins is in PST, so updates etc will mostly be provided during USA daytime.
Hi - In preparing for the workshop Identifying for Beginners, I looked through some unknown observations and put together the following questions which I thought might be helpful for you to have prior to the workshop.
Questions for workshop - training:
What do you do if you can’t tell from the picture what they are “observing”? - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/65821316 (In this case the placeholder says poison ivy, so would you use that even if you can’t see any poison ivy?)
What if the observer made comments that indicate what they are observing but no identification; do I use their comment to enter an identification or use some higher level that I’m possibly able to determine. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/64141461
If we are looking at old observations that have multiple organisms and someone already commented asking the observer to split them, do we need to do anything to them?
What if it’s just nests, tracks, scat, etc.
Today’s cheerful thought: I updated a few in “training” for the ID-a-thon and one has already been updated to a lower level by another identifier.
Thank you @astra_the_dragon for organizing and hosting! I’m having a great rainy day sitting at home IDing, inspired by the ID-a-thon.
Enjoying stumbling down iNat rabbit holes and finding amazing observations and creatures that I’ve never seen before (like this one: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/20902799)
I’d like to know if anyone participating put an ID on an observation of mine during the IDathon, but I don’t know quite how to search that. Seems like the explore feature doesn’t know how to distinguish a time frame in which the identification was made (rather than when the observation was made) and the API “get identifications” doesn’t seem to have a parameter for observer ID.
… and they’re gastropods??