From the ID-a-thon I picked up another batch to slog thru - for the Western Cape. It has FLOWERS down from the 73 pages I started with to 41 - page a day … another 6 weeks, then it will be almost CNC26 and a fresh tsunami. The arthropod residue I cleared on the first day.
https://www.inaturalist.org/stats The deficit is between CIDs around 400K and obs around 800K. Those numbers don’t bear thinking about. OTOH we can CID half the obs to Genus ! These ID-a-thons need deliberate targets and new and better tools for generalists (yesterday I used the new Disagreements filter - which is more efficient - I can split my batches into 2 autopilot sets).
With different targets and tools for the identifiers shifting the diddicult (damned difficult ((dicots)) ;~) half from Genus to a finer ID.
Needs ID at Genus 33 million. Plants 13 million. Fungi 4 million. With the lesser half distributed kindly across 7 iconic taxa. 11 million insects. Plants and insects each need better support. Those humungous numbers would be less daunting if not Wild was split off from Broken.
And I counter that despair with Flora of Africa is 60% RG - so many good botanists quietly getting on with the task in hand.
just a few random thoughts (and please pardon my bad English, I am pretty tired currently):
Question 4 was a bit difficult for me since I considered some of the options no problem at all (and only a few a real problem). Ranking those that are no problem to me turned out to be pretty random. I would have loved to be able to do a down-vote on those - or maybe to have a different type of question at all, like: having the option for each of the points to vote on a scale from maybe 1 to 10 if it’s a big problem, or a medium one, or none at all.
Managing notifications: 1) They should be manageable like emails. I would like to be able to mark them individually as read, even to delete them, but also to mark them as “unread” / “new” after having read them. (Not having these options currently I even wondered if it makes sense to give users the option to have them sent on as an email to a designated email-address - then I would create a new email-address for inat-notices only and I would be able to manage them there. But that would probably create millions of emails every day. Not a good idea, I guess.) 2) And to me it’s really annoying that by klicking on the red icon for notifications in the upper right corner (website) all notifications get marked as “read”. I have lost so many (older) notifications this way … but this button is necessary to find an old notification that you have missed, because finding it in your Dashboard means you have to klick through all notifications (often several hundred) to find the few that you missed. Still: klicking this button should not mark notifications as read! Only klicking the notification itself should.
Data quality - especially of the data that gets exported to GBIF: I know of the discussion about how easily an observation should become research grade. But (as has been mentioned before in this thread) with just two users agreeing it’s very often like this: the observer starts with a general ID, someone else gives a species ID and the observer agrees to it. But increasing the demand for research grade to 3 agreeing users would indeed make it virtually impossible for a lot of species to reach research grade due to the lack of IDers. But with regards to data quality of GBIF-exports: maybe there should be a “certainty level” added to research-grade-observations depending on the number of agrees, like “low”/”medium”/”high” (and a filter to make it possible for researchers to filter for a certain level or exclude one of the levels)… or maybe there should be a “gold-standard” added, something like “confirmed by curator” that any research grade observation receives if one of the agreeing persons is a curator (hoping that they know what they do and about their responsibility, more/better than a normal user).
Moreover I am worried about how to distinguish cultivated plants from wild ones in cases where the picture does not give a clue if the plant is cultivated or not (e. g. because the only picture is a close-up that does not show anything of the surroundings). I am worried that some users have found out that by taking pictures this way no one can tell that it’s a cultivated plant, which enables them to increase their species count. And also they often do not reply on comments. (Do people who share observations via one of the apps see / receive comments at all?) But I have no good idea on how to counter this yet. (Although maybe it would help to create an additional level that plants marked as cultivated (and something similar for animals) can reach in order to increase the incentive to mark your own observations as cultivated when uploading and increasing the incentive for IDers to ID cultivated plants. Also it might be helpful to place the “cultivated”-button more prominently - e. g. when preparing the observation for upload: inside the field of the observation just below the field for the locality data (website, when doing individual uploads). Actually I would prefer to give the question (“cultivated?”) two options: “yes” and “no”, and make klicking one mandatory for the upload (although many users might find this annoying, I guess).)
I think i skipped the ranking question (question four) since i didn’t have much an opinion on many of the options listed. I did have on some, though, so collectable data missed on that part.
If the product roadmap doesn’t include a very powerful notification revamp, lots of people are going to be disappointed. We were teased about this in 2019 and it’s now 2025.
The questionnaire page that frustrated me most was the one about things that make identifying harder (page 4). First, it asked us to rank all the possibilities offered, though many of them fall into a “no problem” category or a “minor problem” category and only a few were worth ranking, in my opinion. And then it didn’t include the biggest problem of all: notifications! I didn’t fill in that page.
@DianaStuder Thank you, yes I use keyboard shortcut. As I mentioned in this other post, it’s painful for the hand to push the L+A±→, and we still have to go through each observation one by one which can be too slow because we have to load the full size image. I ended up with a tendonitis and stopped intensive life stage annotations since then. Thanks to other annotators that joined inaturalist since then, I always have enough of caterpillars observations to ID. But I hope I will soon have the chance to try the Megachile tool, as sometimes I want to annotate all obs of a specific species to better understand its lifecycle.
At least on Android, I do get in-app notifications when people comment on observations (and I think this is regardless of whether I made the observation on my phone or through the web browser, but I’m not 100% certain).
That said, I have fiddled with my notification settings. Maybe on the default settings there are so many notifications from agreeing and improving IDs that they drown out comments for many users? I also have no idea what the iOS experience is like.
I have a question regarding the issue that was also one point in the survey - that there are quite a lot of observations that do not contain the information needed for ID.
How would you deal with an user that constantly uploads observations in the group that you identify, but the observations are all not possible to identify because of way to bad image quality/ images do not show any traits needed for ID, and the user also does not answer to comments etc, and thereby the ID page is constantly flooded by unidentifieable observations?
As with any other user, “constantly” or not. Suggest some ID from the pics to the best of your abilities, and move on. Or if no clue, hit reviewed and move on. Or if (and only if!) there’s no sign of a creature, use the appropriate DQA and move on.
I haven’t had exactly this situation, but I guess I’d start pasting a standard comment like “Images not adequate for ID”, giving a coarse ID and marking the DQA in such a way as to send it to Casual. If they give no ID, you might need a partner to send the observations to iNat purgatory.
I have a few taxons I have started to follow here in Australia so I get notifications. My very first wish for notifications is a “Dismiss” cross so I can get rid of the ones I have looked at. I don’t necessarily want to unfollow or unsubscribe; I want to get it off my notification list so I don’t accidentally look at it again.
Another option - which would only work for you - is to mute that observer, if they don’t respond to your comments. Team up to send them to Casual if you have other active taxon identifiers.
I wonder sometimes if iNat were to advertise an event like the recent IDathon, but perhaps on a smaller scale for annotations. I’ve occasionally run ‘annotatathons’ on the hoverfly projects, and it’s amazing how quickly they can get done. I see there are 32 million lep observations, of which 19.5 million have life stage - actually quite impressive. So 12.5 million to go. 5000 people made their first ID during the IDathon, and no doubt a lot more were involved. It’s not so hard to do large numbers of life stage annotations, as the amount of thought required is much less. I wonder what could be acheived with a concentrated weekend? Perhaps though, as your comment indicates, there should be some accompanying advice on avoiding RSI!
I often check my own observations with &order_by=updated_at and that shows me recent changes/things I would have gotten notified for if I had it on, less intrusive this way
My approach in similar situations has been to add a ¬_user_id=username1 parameter to my at this point rather complicated Identify bookmarks. It does not really do anything to change the behaviour of the user in question, but it does significantly improve my enjoyment of the process.