Many of my observations are very clear, but they’re taken in areas where there are few observers or identifiers, sometimes of species that aren’t well known, and it’s completely common for it to take many years for someone to even look at them, let alone offer a confirming or basic observation.
People in relatively high traffic areas have a very different perspective on the amount of time identifications take.
We live in a time of instant gratification (or at least rapid), but for some things we need to slow down and cultivate a bit more patience.
As a point, museum collections over 200 years old are still being identified and waiting for identifications. No one is suggesting we say, “Oh, these are too old now and we should not bother any more, there’s nothing useful there.”
I’d like to make an ancillary point to this conversation about blurry or distant observations. Bear with me, because this is a bit of a round-about explanation.
I’ve been IDing a lot of Unknowns recently (maybe more than a thousand?) and I’ve gotten frustrated with feeling as though I’m not making any progress. But I realized today that I’ve been defining “progress” as “finishing the task” and, well, that’s just not going to happen any time soon.
If instead I define progress as “giving other observers some feedback on their observations and helping them to learn about the natural world,” I’ve certainly been doing quite a lot of that. I’ve also been “helping to clarify the distribution of species” and “learning about the natural world myself” and maybe even “making expert identifiers happy” by feeding them many, MANY unidentified spiders, orthopterans, dicots, and even birds and primates to work on.
In other words, there is no end point to identifying Unknowns - and no end point to identifying blurry or distant observations as well. We can easily get ourselves all worked up over observers who don’t know they “should” add an initial ID to their observations or don’t know how to take a “good” photo or don’t have the right kind of camera or don’t respond to questions, etc. But I find it more productive to focus on the idea that somebody somewhere cared enough about the natural world to try to take a photo or make a recording and share it on this site. Neither iNaturalist nor all the observers are perfect, but boy, they come remarkably close a very large percent of the time.
I understand that fear entirely. I, at one point, and maybe still by some, was basically known on the site for having pretty cruddy quality pictures. Many of which couldn’t be identified properly. Most are deleted now because it was learned through time that certain things need more clarity than others, that kind of thing. My son also became more open to the idea of using higher quality gear, but that’s besides the main point here.
People who left comments along the lines of “unfortunately it’s too blurry for me to ID” or “clearer picture would be needed for an ID” never offended me. In fact, it was helpful and informational. Others left comments like “useless” or “awful” or other things like that, and that did offend me. Point being, I’d recommend utilizing the care you have for this into a useful piece of advice for other users, when you have the patience and time to do so, which we don’t always have. The DQA can be helpful for when you don’t feel like taking the time to comment or discuss. Maybe type a comment out and reuse it if you like it, too. As long as it’s polite and formulated knowing that the user probably is just trying their best, it’ll probably be helpful and not hurtful or offensive.
That’s a pretty poor example, because the primary problem isn’t that you’re playing on the lawn or that the lawn wasn’t the intended subject of the photo, but rather that a lawn is artificially planted and hard to ID very specifically (and even if you could it’s likely a manmade cultivar rather than a natural species). Even a childless lawn photo isn’t a terribly useful thing to put on iNat. A better example might be a photo of you as a child admiring a butterfly sunbathing on a garden wall. So long as the butterfly is visible enough in the shot to be identifiable, it’s a valid and useful observation to upload in my view.
Sorry! We shouldn’t have a statute of limitations on unidentified observations! You’re right! Possibly a time after which observations can be voted off the island, so to speak, but not a deadline.
If it is a picture of a protea, dont think twice - post it. I will be happy to try and ID it and every record is a good record. The biggest issue is getting data - having to deal with ambiguous or impossible IDs is relatively easy.
Far more commonly the issue with identification is that for many organisms more than one photo, or a particular view is needed to see the diagnostic features. It is as often as not about the quality of the photos, but about what features are needed in the observation. And that is a matter of training (by the identifier) and learning (by the observer and identifier) for a particular taxon. The first half dozen photos by a novice in any taxon are generally much more difficult to identify to lowest ranks. Many superb herbarium specialists cannot identify organisms from photos (or in the field often) - and photos that one cannot identify today, may be trivial in a few years time: if only we could learn as fast as the AI!
I just wish we could away with hybrids. With up to 4-way backcrosses on the market for proteas, ID of these is currently way beyond me.
The irony is that it is easy to use a faster shutter speed (you may have to use a higher ASA, but all of todays modern cameras and celphones can do that). It is learning about how to take better photographs or well planned sets of photographs with what is available. iNaturalist’s emphasis should be about continuous improvement. A herbarium specimen can be put under the microscope or SEM or DNA analyser. A blurry dot is just that and should not be mis guessed and wasting resources on it. I very much would like to see such being marked as Casual.
Sob. I would be found slumped dead over my laptop, with a string of iNat tabs open.
I focus on one task, with a target I could conceivably reach … then the next one …
Identifying is about triage. I look at number of obs, is it someone new, try harder to give them a visible response to Please tell me what this is, copypasta my stock responses.
Each obs gets its moment of my attention, deal out the next 10 cards (fits my laptop screen) I will try, but not too hard. That is for the taxon specialists, if I can get it to their filter.
And in between are the magic ones. Adding missing species. Pulling in people to discuss what it is and isn’t and why. Remember the Pareto Principle all the people quietly dipping in and reading along, and learning with iNat.
I think it was around this time last year that I set myself a goal of 60 IDs a day, because that would quickly get me to the point where I had twice as many IDs as observations. Well, a couple of days ago I made 488 IDs in a day and decided I ought to limit myself to around 60 IDs a day, because otherwise I wasn’t doing much else with my life. So, yeah, I hear you.
(But it’s winter here and there isn’t that much else to do, so…)
The other day I identified a picture of blurry European Starlings on a power line, partly because I’d been seeing huge numbers of starlings on that same power line on a daily basis. I also gave a suggested id on a tree once because I was fairly certain I’d seen that same exact tree on that same exact trail. I’ve uploaded a blurry pic of a red-shouldered hawk that wasn’t likely identifiable mostly for me as it was my only picture of one. I think there are plenty of possible reasons for a blurry picture and you just shouldn’t let it worry you as you are scrolling by. It is easy enough to ignore it.
