Identifications, and it’s not even close. Here is a screenshot of my profile:
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I mostly just observe. I don’t have any particularly useful ID skills. I know most of the common North American birds, and some other things that are very easy to identify, but there are hundreds of people who can do that. I’d like to learn to identify something that’s actually needed so I could make myself useful but I don’t really know where to start, I guess I’d have to find some guides to study.
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Opposite for me. I can batch upload a lot of observations in the same time it takes to look at one observation, look in my field guides, compare with other similar observations, deliberate before making an ID.
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I have a lot more observations than ID’s. 25 000+ obs, 8000+ ID’s. Not apologising for that. My passion is observing nature, I try to spend a lot of time out in nature (not nearly enough, but that is a different subject) and I take a lot of photographs, loving every minute.
Yes, I do try to give back, and try to do ID’s most days of the week. But it is a slow process, since I don’t spend much time just agreeing with ID’s already made by others. I want to be able to justify my ID’s, so a lot of thought goes into every one, and when I am not sure, I skip.
And my area of interest is arthropods. The more I learn about our local arthropods, the fewer ID’s I make. So much of what we see here are still undescribed, it would be irresponsible to go down to species and sometimes even genus level with the little knowledge we have.
So I try to ID consistently, but my observations will probably always be a lot more.
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Try going up a taxon level, and helping to direct obs to the relevant taxon specialist. Random example - you may not know which dragonfly, but you can move the insect ID to Odonata. Or retrieve an oops, that is an owl not dragon fly.
Or annotate ? @cassia too
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No - we count the IDs for others.
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What she said! It can take several steps to get to species. I identified some plant in South Africa as a monocot. Someone else in South Africa just identified it as a member of Commelinales. I know the genus Commelina, if I see a flower (it looks like it should have three petals, but one is missing, corresponding to three members of the Kommelijn family, two of whom prospered), but this plant’s flowers have all three petals, and they’re yellow, not blue.
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Definitely IDs. It’s harder and it takes more time to find specimens than to identify others’ obs. So far I’ve got 20k IDs.
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There are a number of forum threads with tips and suggestions for ways to get started as an IDer – e.g., this recent one (and the linked threads).
As for where to start – wherever you want! Sometimes the forum discussions make it sound complicated, but there isn’t really any one best way to approach IDing. I think a lot of people try out a variety of different things before figuring out what they enjoy IDing and what workflow is most satisfying for them.
I started IDing because around the time I joined iNat, there was a school project that resulted in a lot of observations of daffodils ID’d as primroses and similar mix-ups and I realized that there were some common organisms that I recognized and I could help correct these observations. So browsing observations in your area and seeing what you can contribute can be a good way to get started.
Or pick something that interests you and you want to learn more about – or something that you feel like you are reasonably confident recognizing in your own observations (if, say, odonates all look more-or-less alike to you, this may not be the best place to start; but if you see them and think, this is a damselfly not a dragonfly, or I recognize that pattern of markings, you have a good intuitive basis that you can build on). Ideally I would suggest choosing something where there is not already a surfeit of IDers (i.e., maybe not birds and other vertebrates unless there is something you are really passionate about).
It is not necessary to provide a species ID all the time. Lots of observations get entered with no ID or a broad ID and if you can refine the ID – that insect is a butterfly – you will increase the likelihood that the observation will be seen by an expert who can take it further. A nice side-effect of this is that you then get to see subsequent IDs for the observation, and maybe over time you will be able to take the ID further yourself.
(I find that I can provide more useful IDs in regions where I am somewhat familiar with the flora and fauna, but I think some users enjoy the opportunity to virtually explore far-away places and discover unfamiliar organisms.)
I find it helpful to go back at least a day or two so I don’t feel like I am competing with other IDers for the most recent observations. You can also filter your search for observations that only have a broad ID, or only observations by new accounts, etc.
It is OK to make mistakes. As a new IDer it is often a good idea to not suggest species IDs unless you are pretty certain of the ID and know that there are no lookalikes, but for broader IDs it is fine to suggest an ID that you think is likely even if you aren’t totally confident about it. And if you get it wrong (say, the “butterfly” turns out to be a caddis fly instead), it is not a big deal, as long as you follow your notifications and withdraw your ID if necessary.
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I have made 11 observations and 112,800 identifications, all are in the UK, mostly plants but also butterflies, some moths and other insects and some fungi. I send the vast majority of my own observations into the appropriate UK recording scheme, most of which feed into GBIF so I don’t want to duplicate them. The species I have uploaded here are things I couldn’t get an ID for, and I also wanted to see the process.
I use iNat on my laptop, I don’t often use my phone for any kind of recording, although I’ve just downloaded and tried out the BSBI’s recording app which is great for plants.
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I had more observations for years but that has since flipped. I try to keep them about even.
I have 203,992 observations and 215,558 identifications.
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When I started out, my goal was to make at least as many identifications as I was receiving, which evolved to at least as many IDs as obs to 2-3x as many and by now I’m at 7x as many IDs as observations. That ratio will likely keep increasing since it’s much faster to sit down and knock out a few IDs over lunch break than processing pictures to upload observations. In addition, I have an almost 1:1 ratio of IDs and annotations.
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Have that one growing in my garden - after seeing it would make a perfect choice for a shady pot!
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This is probably the best explanation I’ve ever seen in a single post about how to approach things as a beginning identifier!
I do have one thing to add to the list though: you can always look through old records. I’ve recently been going through all the needs IDs for my area sorted from oldest to newest, and although I pass by a great number I can’t do anything about I’ve been surprised by how many records I’ve encountered with good, clear photos of common, easily recognizable species (yes, including the birds that people say already have too many identifiers) that must have just snuck past all the identifiers’ eyes somehow. Literally, no IDs other than the original uploader’s. And, I should note, this is in one of the more active regions on iNat–I’m sure this happens to an even greater extent elsewhere.
In other words, so what if the only things you feel confident in identifying are the common things that it feels like everyone can ID? There’s too many observations for us to catch them all, there’s still a need for help from anyone willing to provide it!
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At the moment, I’ve got 33,835 identifications and 366 observations. I will try to put up a group at least every few weeks, but I will usually give a easily identifiable photo which causes me to miss some opportunities.
With identifications, though, I can make lots of those pretty quickly. The majority of them are made when I have 10 or 15 extra minutes. In this time I can usually make well over 100 identifications, often of North American birds and vascular plants. It is most time efficient for me to filter the observations by species and go through them 2 times - the first time identifying the ones that are clearly correct, and the second time identifying the ones that would take a few more seconds to pick up on the filed marks.
The time that I find I can get the most done is when I am sick. If I have the energy, I can get a few thousand in a day by using the method above. I do sometimes find that there aren’t enough identifiable observations of a specific species to make it worth filtering down to only that one species. in that case, I will just leave it at more broad search like “Birds” or “Vascular Plants”.
Until writing this, I hadn’t really realized that I had a “system” of identifying. It is really what I just naturally do. It has taken about 3 years to reach these numbers, but it does show how much can be done in a little amount of time if you have the ability.
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Every ID counts. Even if hundreds of people can identify North American birds, the world could use another person who can. Someone needs to do it, and you can be that someone. Start small, then expand your horizons.
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My only caveat about this is that, if one is completely new to IDing and not confident that one’s IDs are correct, IDing older records means that one is less likely to get feedback. Newer records (say, less than 1-2 weeks) have the advantage that there are usually more people looking at them, and thus more people who might confirm, refine, or correct your ID. Of course this depends somewhat on the habits of other IDers in a given region/taxon, but what I see is that lot of people seem to focus on more recent observations and then look at older ones if they happen to have time.
Sometimes these are the result of someone having deleted their account (and thus their IDs as well). Or they may be observations that were originally entered without an ID, or with missing information that made them casual. But yeah, sometimes observations also simply get missed for no obvious reason.
I find that going back too far in time can result in diminishing returns because the oldest observations have already been picked over, but I’ll often use the random sorting option in Identify.
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I have made more than twice as many identifications as observations, but I always feel like an imposter when I say that because I am so bad at identifications.
I would not be doing identifications if I had not read a post on the forum asking people to help move observations from unknown to some high level identification such as animal or plant. I am so bad with plants that plant, flowering plant, monocot or dicot is often the best I can do, yet I do sometimes see something I have IDed to such a high level get a follow up that moves it to genus or species. (Otherwise, I would have quit.)
For the smaller forms of life (which I call “bugs”) identification to order is often the best I can do, but how can I stop when something I identify to order, which was at Unknown for a year or more, then gets IDed to family, genus or species within a month or two?
I am better with birds (gotta love them!) but I seldom see birds in the Unknown category.
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Wow! I really need to get better at IDs!
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Order is great! For a lot of arthropod taxa, this is the relevant category where the specialists start looking. There is one exception that comes to mind – for Hemiptera, it is helpful if you can get just a tiny bit further to suborder (Auchenorrhyncha for cicadas and leafhoppers, Sternorrhyncha for aphids, and Heteroptera for true bugs).
For some reason observations also seem to take longer to move forward if they get ID’d as “Insecta” rather than “Pterygota” (the vast majority of insects are in Pterygota, and this is where observations end up if there is an order disagreement, so I suspect more IDers look at it than at Insecta).
I agree that it is really rewarding to sort through old observations, add a fairly broad ID, and watch the specialists get them to RG within days or hours.
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