Create a way that the same id can be given to multiple observations at the same time. For example, for “unknown” observations it would be good for applying a coarse ID rather than going through them one by one. Also for filtering to a particular taxa and selecting the ones you agree with.
I use the Web application and not the app so this may not apply to the app.
Can you clarify this a bit? Do you mean some feature of Identify where you just apply the same ID to a bunch of observations at once? I’m not sure I’d find that valuable, personally. I find clicking the “Agree” button pretty efficient, and I rarely see a bunch of unknowns that I want to add exactly the same ID to.
i imagine it might also lead to wrong IDs or bulk ‘agreeing’ without good reason
When I go through “Unknown” observations usually most of them are plants, sometimes nearly an entire page at a time, and I don’t know anything about identifying plants past dicot/monocot. At these times I wish I could click a checkbox on each observation and then do something like “ID selected as: Plants” because going through tons of observations and adding the same ID every time gets tedious fast. In this case there is no “Agree” button.
But I also recognize that some non-plant observations would likely get mixed in occasionally, and also I’d be unlikely to read the descriptions or placeholders for each observation if I did this. I can’t decide whether or not it would be worth it. How likely is it that the observer or someone else would come along and correct me if I were to make that mistake?
An example is Convergent Lady Beetles or Western Honey Bee. These seem to frequently be posted as Unknown, Insect, Lady Beetle or Bee. Sometimes I filter for them and do a batch all at once. I do this occasionally on those already Research Grade to correct them too. I can sit on the couch with my tablet and clean up the ‘low hanging fruit’. I figure if I can spend some time on the easier ones, then it is more time for better experts to spend on the challenging ones.
In these case it is not a matter of hitting the agree button. I go through each one and enter an ID and sometimes a comment. It doesn’t work for all of them, but often you can tell from the image. If I do a lot of them, it increases my chances of making a mistake. As the suggested ID’s appear as I am typing, my fat fingers occasionally select the wrong line. Maybe the answer is to take more time on each ID, but over time I would be less likely to do it.
Just an idea to help clean up the backlog.
At a coarse level, it is likely mistakes will be caught on the next pass. Even with mistakes they are more likely to be reviewed than leaving them at unknown.
Like @upupa-epops, I would use it to add coarse IDs after I had filtered the Identify page to only show unknowns.
I can see it being especially handy during bio blitzes and sudden student influxes to at least ID multiple observations as “plants” or “arthropods” at once.
This isn’t quite a batch option but it does make things go faster when you’re working your way through a group that is dominated by a few taxa. You can also use it to paste comments.
In Windows 10, go to Settings and open “clipboard settings.” Turn on Clipboard History. Then it keeps stuff you’ve copied and you press Windows + V (instead of ctrl + V) to get a list of your history. Click an item to paste it. It seems to store at least 20 items.
I agree that adding a tool for adding many identifications would be great. I just searched all the Unknown species for Costa Rica, and the entire first page are Fungi. I would be great if I could easily select multiple observations, like all 30 on this page, and identify them as fungi instead of having to manually select each observation and paste “Fungi” into the Add ID box.
It’s also a very useful tool for out-of area observations, e.g. fungi obs. are mostly orphaned and nobody checks them, so there can be thousands of wrong ids of some american species “seen” worldwide, with more and more obs. because of “seen nearby”, it’d be much faster to batch-reid them than spending hours going one by one.
I would be concerned about the potential for mass-vandalism with a tool like this available.
i agree that it’s probably not a good thing to have a batch add for identifications, but i think it would be useful to effectively allow the creation of macros – collections of actions – that could be applied with keyboard shortcuts.
so for example, if you’re identifying species A (a flowering plant), you could assign the following shortcuts these actions:
this way, you could go through a set of observations one by one and still take appropriate action on each observation relatively easily.
Maybe it could be a tool only available to trusted users
I was just going through the evening primrose family and most I could tell from the thumbnail were Oenothera or Ludwigia. It would have gone so much faster if I could click a bunch of checkboxes and batch add a genus
Or maybe have a limit per day for the batch tool. So you can catch abusers before they cause too much trouble. I’m limited by how much I can ID based on time limit. I could get a lot more done in a day if I could for example batch ID a whole lot of evening primrose family into genus Oenothera and then spend the rest of my time looking in detail at the ones I know are in Ludwigia to get them to species level.
Well then the subspecies shouldn’t be added at all.
If the distinguishing characteristics are evident sure. But I thought you said a species with only one subspecies?
And can you determine this from the photos or are you classifying them via range? If the latter I feel it’s not a good thing to be doing and I don’t want people doing so on my observations. But this has been a well worn topic on the forum and elsewhere.
Well, if you are interested you can read my older posts on the subject.
When subspecies identification is made only by range based on range maps, and range maps (like the ones on iNat) are created based on those IDs, you create garbage circular data.