I’m at 6.8K observations and 296K identifications. So about 43 to 1 difference.
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typo ?
No, momentary confusion about which names go with which concepts. Fixed, thanks.
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I have thousands of identifications and have uploaded only a few observations. I just like identifying.
And I think all users who have far more observations should start identifying, there is a huge task to do.
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I take a lot of time picking out which of my photos are the best and deleting the others, then cropping the photos. Sometimes I have to look at a bunch of maps to figure out where I was since my cameras don’t have GPS. I also spend time to try to learn/research to ID my own observations, whereas when I ID other people’s observations I often ID ones that I can ID without consulting books (I memorize the characters to look for (or have a few quick notes as a reminder). I mostly ID plants since there is a large need for plant IDers.
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That will decrease, though, as you get to know species better. At least some of them will begin to stand out immediately as species that you don’t need to deliberate about.
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I crop occasionally and rarely discard photos (though I have photos of a house under construction, which I don’t upload here unless there’s an ant or bee on the house). Once I spotted a mantis walking through plants and took two photos, which I cropped before uploading.
Especially with animals, I will take a whole bunch of photos since lots of them are out of focus or the animal is behind a branch or something. Then if they are far away I will crop to 2048 pixels square or less so that iNat doesn’t resize the photo.
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Thank you, that’s very helpful. At the moment I’m mostly just working on getting better at identifying my own observations instead of just posting them with a very coarse ID and relying on other people to do it because I’m often just lazy when I have a lot of obs to post. Over the summer I was trying to take the time to go through a guide to post my flies with the correct species ID, and had most of them right, but I’ve found it difficult to find such comprehensive guides with real photos for many taxa.
Yes, of course, and that is fun, getting to know the bugs and spiders. But the easier ones I recognise easily are usually already ID’d by the time I see them! I like to go through older observations of especially spiders, but even if I instantly recognise something, I still spend some time on each ob. As I have said, I try to ID consistently, but it will remain a slow process. i’d have to completely stop observing for quite a while if I want my ID’s to catch up with obs, and that is not the plan. ;-)
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Yes, this is really cool. The only thing that slightly bugs me is that it tells you the number of observations you’ve annotated, rather than the number of annotations you’ve added.
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My second Forum post here. This seems like a topic for which I have some interest.
I have around 7.1k identifications I have done for others, and around 1.4k observations I have made myself. I only came to iNat about 2 or so years ago.
I would make more observations if I didn’t keep mountain biking or hiking the same trails that I can ride to from my home, and not seeing a lot of new organisms, as I have an aversion to driving my car to recreate.
As a retired professor, I am accustomed to reviewing the work of others, either student work or peer-review of colleagues’ work, so doing identifications feels natural to me. I tend to focus identifications in my home region, on what I know, or on fairly obvious ones. Doing identifications is a nice way to learn (or refresh my memory regarding) new species. Doing identifications is also a way to get to know some “frequent flyer” iNat contributors. Also, from a courtesy point of view, I would feel bad if I wasn’t doing “my share” of identification.
I therefore wonder about folks on iNat who upload thousands of their own observations, usually narrowed down to a species, but provide few if any identifications for others. This issue is very similar to what I encountered in my scholarly work, where many scholars what to submit work for publication, but fewer qualified people want to do a lot of peer-review, making it tough for journal editors. Therefore its considered a “duty” for senior scholars to do peer review. But this is a topic for a different Forum post.
Another topic for a different Forum post: To what extent is iNat a social medium where folks can interact (you know, like humans used to?), vs a solo enterprise with little to no interaction other than stilted kinda-weird super-brief exchanges?
-Steve
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Let me try to provide some feedback on this. I’m not a regular on the forum and when I do read it, this seems to be a common sentiment I see. I think I have seen the ratio of at least 10:1 Identifications to Observations as the goal of many people. Contrarily, this is me:
I’m a retired business owner and ecologist who spent almost 40 years working in environmental consulting and restoration in the Ohio River Valley. The last half of my career was spent working on the most difficult and problematic projects my company had. When I retired, I took it upon myself to initiate the reforestation of a low-elevation cloud forest in southwest Costa Rica as a way to give back some of what I made to the environment. I had spent time in Costa Rica as a graduate student but when I returned, I could reliably identify only a couple of trees and a few birds.
I spent 8 years learning the local species, collecting seeds, growing trees, and then reforesting my project area. I found that I really enjoyed the challenge of identifying the plant species in the local forest…and it was an important part of the work I was doing. Find a fruit in the rainforest, track down the tree, work to identify the species, learn its life history, see if it is a suitable species for reforestation, and then grow it in sufficient volume to contribute to reforestation. It’s really the basis of ecology and environmental restoration. Basically, how do you regrow a functioning ecosystem if you don’t know what the individual components of the ecosystem are?
During all of this, I purchased the 8 volume manual of plants of Costa Rica and take a ridiculous amount of pleasure in finding a plant I have never seen before then looking at my nearly 6,000 pages of potential species and finding the correct identification in five minutes - knowing that 7 years ago I would have been lost. And its all written in a language that I do not speak fluently.
As my project transitions from planting to maintenance, I have time to do what I want to. And what I want to do is visit new ecosystems, learn the species in the ecosystem, recognize the role of those species, and gain an conceptual idea of how the ecosystem functions. It is challenging in many ways, not the least of which is learning what the species are in areas with more limited resources than Costa Rica.
I use iNaturalist as a valuable resource for identification. It is a wonderful database of potential sources of identification or sometimes just clues to identifications. I appreciate the contributions of experts in local plants and ecosystems with their guidance and resources. I know a surprising number of helpful people in Costa Rica, Ecuador, western Africa, and other places mostly by their avatars on iNaturalist.
What does my approach offer that an Identifier’s does not? It’s hard to say and depends on you viewpoint. I checked and I have about 40 observations that are the one and only observation of the species on iNaturalist. I’ve had many more but those have been added to by other Observers, possibly because they saw my observation and now had an ID for their observation. Does that offer value to the community? I would say it does though the amount of value may or may not be considerable. I would offer it is no more or less valuable to someone placing identifications on species in North America or Europe.
I think the real question people should ask, though, is “are you happy with the contribution you make to iNaturalist?” For me the answer is yes. I greatly enjoy tracking down rare species and identifying them then sharing those observations on iNaturalist. If I was told I had to identify 110,000 observations by others to be able to participate, I would quit. It would be like a job and if it was a job I would delegate that task to someone else. I have no idea what makes others happy but I don’t know if others would spend a week traveling in the Amazon, see a tree, take 30 photos of every possible key feature, research resources for identification, find one for $130 in Europe, order it, wait four months for it to be delivered, then spend 3 minutes verifying that what you thought was correct was, in fact, correct. For me, the first thing I did was Whatsapp my friend in Ecuador, tell him. His response was to celebrate and ask me to update his observation with the correct ID. For me, all that made the trip worthwhile.
Just to close this ramble, all I can recommend is that you should be happy with what you do and be grateful there is a silly little phone app that lets you do something you enjoy while also giving thousands of others something that they enjoy all while giving people the opportunity to participate in better understanding our natural environment. In business parlance, it is wins across the board.
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@jasonhernandez74 brilliantly put it this way:
And of course Jason is 100% right.
I think everyone* would do well to assume good intent and that nobody is required to mount a defense or explanation of their ratios.
*myself included, because I confess I sometimes find myself thinking some people might do well to get more “outdoor, enjoying nature” time.
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I would offer that it is more valuable. North america and Europe are well-documented and their ecosystems are well-studied. Meanwhile, countries like Costa Rica and even more so Brazil or Congo are the places where we hear of biodiversity being lost before it can even be documented.
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I’m at roughly equal. 16k observations, 18k IDs.
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Nice!
and those are places where it is good to help with IDs, if we could or would.
I think the subset of users who are active in the iNat forum skews heavily towards people who are active IDers. One reason for this is that reviewing and IDing observations typically involves more complexity than uploading them and therefore people find it useful to discuss their experiences and try to find solutions to challenges and recurring frustrations. By contrast, I suspect that much of the social interaction connected with observing happens on the observations themselves.
So the answers in this thread reflect the fact that many of them are written by users who are passionate about IDing. The ratios that people are citing are not expectations for others, but personal goals that help us motivate ourselves and take pride in what we have accomplished. I don’t think they are intended to suggest that people with high ID:observation ratios are better or more virtuous users than those who mostly observe, and these numbers of course do not reflect whether we are making “easy” IDs that do not require much time, or ones that require extensive research.
You may spend a lot of time researching the IDs for your observations, but this is not a requirement either. There are plenty of people who upload observations with a general ID because that is the extent of their knowledge or who rely on the CV and the community to tell them what they saw.
For example, I’m a generalist observer with some specialized knowledge of particular taxa that interest me. One of my main interests (bees/hymenopterans) is known to be fairly difficult and there are additional challenges connected with learning to ID from field photos rather than specimens. While I do spend time researching the IDs for many of my observations, there is some portion of cases where I observe something simply because it happened to be there so I might as well document it, or because I was curious about it but don’t know anything about the taxon. For these observations, often I currently do not have the skill to provide a precise ID myself, and I know that it is unlikely that I will be able to acquire that skill in the near future. What this means is that for some portion of my observations, I am dependent on the community to provide accurate IDs for me. Even for my taxa of interest, I often find that I have reached the limits of my experience and the feedback from more skilled and experienced users is invaluable.
So one reason that I ID is to give back to the community by sharing what expertise I do have, in exchange for other’s expertise that I have benefited from as an observer.
Is this a requirement? No. But it is something I can do that helps iNat keep working. Because without IDers, much of the data on iNat would be fairly useless. Since I have acquired a certain degree of specialized expertise, there is a sense in which it feels like it would be inconsiderate to choose not to share my knowledge at least in some small way, whether this be a handful of IDs or a hundred or a thousand. IDing is also a way that I can practice and improve my skills, so I benefit as well.
And I enjoy it. Probably this is the main reason that most of us ID – not because we have to, but because we want to.
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https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2023
https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2023/dianastuder you can also display your slice. How many people did I ID for, how many helped my obs to a better ID?? Those conversations with taxon specialists are a substantial part of what I have learnt about biodiversity in my years on iNat.