The 500th place observer for 2023 had 6010 observations, which is by far the most a 500th or cutoff has had in a year. I hope to see this number go up as prolific observers continue to accumulate observations and new observers join.
However, is this eventually going to level out? My 6100 observations rank me 482, where it would have ranked me at 347 last year.
Please keep on observing to grow Inat and identifying other’s observations and maybe as a whole we can observe 50 million observations in 2024 to continue scientific growth!
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I hope those 500 are also flying high on the IDs for others list.
Otherwise we swim in an ocean of Needs ID …
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Ohh, very interesting. Looks like to make top 100 you would have needed almost 12300. I made it to 288th myself. Sorting by species count instead of observation count I even get 180th.
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Looking at my own observations in 2023, 4466 out of 7793 are already research grade, so 57%. I usually do not ID my own observations to species, so this means two separate experts each IDed them to species, so it’s “real RG” without agree-clicking.
Out of the remaining 43%, those are not in Needs ID because of lack of identifiers, I’d say every single one of them has been looked at by multiple experts. My pictures just often are not good enough to go to species and nobody ever uses the “as good as it can get” box.
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Almost 13K obs … mostly with 2 IDs from others, you say = 26K
And, how many IDs for others to balance the 26K. That is my whinge.
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Some of my identifiers have >500K IDs and little obs, so it balances a bit? 
But more seriously, yes, I know it’s a problem, and I’m basically lucky to have observations in Europe and North America which is where there is more identifiers. (I am working to get my ids-for-others up as well, but it takes me about an hour reading through keys for a single observation at this point, so it’s going slow, and often I get stuck in the key and have to give up without knowing what it is.)
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I sympathize with the struggle to work through a key without a satisfactory outcome. It happens to me a lot, too.
If IDing is something you want to do, but you don’t feel like you have much to contribute: there are lots of ways you can help with IDs that may feel more productive and less slow and frustrating. It is not necessary to always provide a species ID – if you can take something that is unknown or has a broad ID like plants or dicots and get it to family or genus (or even just moss, grass, conifer, fern, etc.), this is useful, too. There are also observations that get stuck at a high level due to disagreements and need another IDer or two to push them in the right direction.
I started IDing because around the time I joined iNat there was a school project that resulted in lots and lots of observations of Narcissus being ID’d as Primula and Forsythia being ID’d as Cornus mas and I realized that I could recognize some common plants. (Though I typically don’t ID most ornamentals beyond genus – too many hybrids – and most of these observations need to be marked as non-wild anyway. But this nonetheless helps clear out the pile for people with more expertise than I.)
I’ve also found that while there are a number of active and very knowledgeable plant IDers in Austria and Germany, resources seem to be spread a bit more thinly in some nearby countries where much of the flora is quite similar (e.g. UK, Denmark), so if there are even just a couple of species you do know reasonably well, there may still be plenty of older “needs ID” observations waiting for someone to look at them.
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One other strategy for productive IDing is just to specialize in one genus or a few species that need work. You only need to develop the expertise/get familiar with the relevant info once and then can productively contribute to that one small corner of iNat, but it does make a big difference!
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Working thru keys is beyond me. Respect!
But IDs on iNat have room for everyone. I like to clear the Unknowns for Africa. Today I had a perfect example. Unknown to Order. 10 minutes later! It is sp. And only the third obs on iNat. Now RG with 2 happy Mantodea taxon specialists!
The ID need only go to where taxon specialists catch it with their pre-set filter. And they need US working for their filter.
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Where can the list be found? In the iNat Year in Review?
I happen to be the top observer of reptiles in 2023, with 1395 observations of 71 species. In fact, that was quite surprising even for myself, because I imagined there were many people with more observations.
I try to contribute by IDing at least 5 observations of other people per each observation I upload. Of course, I’m not sticking to this rule strictly, sometimes I make over 150 IDs a day and sometimes I have no time at all, but generally that’s the ratio I aim for :)
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396 with 6,833 observations (1026 species - bet that drops if you specify Research Grade) added in 2023.
I know for a fact I didn’t make that many IDs (I did a fair few where I could - 3966 according to the year in review, or as I’m calling it, iWrappedualist), but I think I paid my penance for that by that time I slogged through the UK’s hundreds of clearly garden wisterias and hibiscuses to mark them as captive.
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5,366 verifiable observations (observed and uploaded) in 2023 for me with 2,100 species, 572 identifiers helping, and 34% research grade.
Math detour:
3 users identified 100 or more of my observations. Top 12 were responsible for 935 IDs. 257 provided one ID each, the next 99 provided 2 each, the next 56 provided 3 each, and the next 25 provided 4 each. 723 IDs from places 136 to 572. Assuming the rest are smoothly distributed (to save time) makes for another 2,460 IDs for a total of 4,118 IDs by other users on my 2023 observations = 7.2 per user and 0.77 per observation.
Year in Review says “640 people helped egordon88 with 4,211 IDs” - counting casual and maybe new IDs on older observations? 6.6 per user and 0.75 per observation.
Unrelated to this topic, but I just noticed that the observation number at the top of YiR is my total verifiable observations even though the wheel visual includes Casual. That’s strange … https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?d1=2023-01-01&d2=2023-12-31&place_id=any&user_id=egordon88&verifiable=any vs https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2023/egordon88
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Yes, I find that one of the more discouraging tasks when reviewing observations – thank you!
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Sometimes I do too many IDs. I’m procrastinating, avoiding doing other things. I also need to work on my uploading obs backlog. So I set myself a limit of 10 obs for others per day (on average). I’ve been naughty and passed it. I’m up to 10.35. https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_identifier_stats.html?user_id=lappelbaum
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Thank you! That should help automatically mark obserbations of those taxa in those places as not wild.
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Made the top 500 at 229th with 8,539 observations but I guess I will have to work harder this year not making the top 500 identifiers with 11,858.
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- And a half. My garden needs me.
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274.44/day lol we should have a ranking. Gamification ftw. ;)
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You can recognize these in the grid view by the little icon that looks like a plant tag – the number next to it is how many IDs have been added, so if you see a high-level taxon that also shows that several IDs have been added, you may be able to nudge it by agreeing with one of them.
If you look at the grid view without filtering – that is, show all observations – you will see the gray bar at the top with number of observations, number of species, number of identifiers, and number of observers. If you click on the number of observers, it will show you the top 500.
With filters, this same procedure works to show you the top observers of just the observations that meet the filtered criteria.
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