I’ve been asked by the LepSoc Africa council to find a way to make it easier for its members to get high quality identifications on iNaturalist. In iNat there are 6864 identifiers of Lepidoptera in Africa and 3557 in South Africa. Apart from a league table of number of identifications there’s no inf…

Hi Steve, First a thanks for all you have done for butterfly id in southern Africa through your books, Facebook group, etc. I think that outside groups often have an unrealistic idea of what iNat can do. It won’t answer all id questions but it certainly helps a lot, both through the CV and throug…

I tag (with his permission) @traianbertau for insects in South Africa. Can you remind the members to annotate (the more the better if they know - this is an adult female, this is a caterpillar, these are the eggs.) They could also help to annotate the already uploaded obs. Since the recent update …

That’s great - I can publish that in LepSoc News Africa. I was able to nail a few myself and I’m not a ‘not-butterfly’ expert!

You might want to edit the topic to be “Contacting lep identifiers in Africa” or something like that. I took a look at this because I was curious, but I was kind of expecting it to be another thread about the etiquette around contacting IDers, not a concrete request for identifier contact preference…

[image] stevewoodhall: I’ve been asked by the LepSoc Africa council to find a way to make it easier for its members to get high quality identifications on iNaturalist If the members of this society have some training and knowledge themselves, it seems like recruiting knowledgeable people to j…

Please consider asking people if they want to have their usernames published so lots of people can tag them. I like to help, but there are limits. (For example, over the past year one observer has tagged me for every single grass he’s posted and hasn’t provided tentative identifications himself. …

I wonder how feasible it would be to introduce a “people who’ve identified observations like this” algorithm to replace the “top identifiers of X” currently shown on observations. For example, on this observation of a Tineoid larva from Australia, my name shows up in the bottom right corner as “Top…

These are great suggestions, thanks. And I’ll take what you recommend seriously. Ultimately it is about learning, but a lot of our members are unused to iNat and get frustrated when they upload something and see a load of conflicting IDs.I’d like a way to encourage them to identify something to at l…

That is kind of what I was driving at. If we know who the top identifiers of a particular high level taxon are, it becomes possible to contact them and ask if they don’t mind being tagged. There were some good suggestions in this thread and I have some things I can try out now.

[image] sedgequeen: Please consider asking people if they want to have their usernames published so lots of people can tag them. people should self-publish / self-identify. they can start a project with the taxa that they are willing to monitor, and others who want to help can join that proje…

[image] DianaStuder: Pre-Maverick Lepidoptera for Southern Africa I find Tony Rebelo amazingly helpful. I asked him for some help on this as well and he’s responded. I’m going to follow up on some of the suggestions below as well, so we can improve the experience for our members and also impr…

Contacting lepidoptera identifiers in Africa

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Identify identifiers IDs General identify	126	3659	September 13, 2025
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Paper about inaturalist The benefits of contributing to the citizen science platform iNaturalist as an identifier General	67	3972	January 8, 2023
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Contacting lepidoptera identifiers in Africa

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