JP keeps them in the project - for stats.
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How useful (or maybe even harmful, depending on the workflow of finer IDers) is narrowing the coarse ID to a slightly finer but maybe less widely known clade?
I learned here that Pterygota is better than Insecta, and inspired by that I inferred that (if it is one, of course) Araneomorpha (roughly spiders not being tarantulas) should be better than Araneae. On the other hand, it might be possible that IDers put their filters on e.g. high=Arachnida and low=Araneae and then miss Araneomorpha.
I think your statement really gets at the key issue, which is what taxa do IDers search for? This probably varies pretty idiosyncratically by taxon. But if you know that key IDers are searching at a given level, then I would guess that IDing to that level will definitely help move things along. I would expect that some higher level IDs don’t help too much but that’s just a guess.
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Edit: Just found that iNat’s official(?) “How to Become a Better Identifier” guide (linked from the Getting Started pages) uses arachnids as the example for refining coarse IDs, with a key for identifying arachnids to Order.
I’ve been doing something similar to @tiwane except I’m looking through the ones stuck at class Arachnida (just in the US, so far). My somewhat less scientific advice would look like this:
- It’s a spider.
- OK, but seriously, it’s probably a spider.
- It might be a harvestman. Look at pictures of cellar spiders and harvestmen until you have an idea of how they look and which is which.
Of course there are other kinds of arachnids, but if you’re identifying unknowns I would recommend against identifying them as just “Arachnids” unless you’re certain they’re not spiders. Many spiders that are obviously spiders have sat at “Arachnids” for years. I assume few are looking there.
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My own answer to your question, is to follow notifications on your IDs.
5 years ago when I came to iNat I did the - politely following guidelines and file the green mysteries in Plantae. Those come back to haunt me all thru those 5 years!
That drove me to add Cape Peninsula plant IDs above family to my daily task bookmarks. Was a mission to clear a 10 year backlog (back to when South Africa was on iSpot)
Small backlog now from GSB - but I will chew on that!
I still think honest Unknowns are better that broad IDs banished to limbo. For example - during CNC and GSB - that limbo means those obs slide out of IDs for friendly contest. Sad. Most especially for people who are new to iNat!
I know what you mean, but I must say that when I look at observations labeled Dicots around here, many (most?) can’t be identified to anything finer, unfortunately.
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I am with you for most of dodgy Dicots.
But. I do find some that are easy to ID, or at least to point in the right direction, or the WRONG one but then taxon specialists whack it back into a better place for us. It is worth picking over dicots.
Yes, it’s definitely worth picking them over!
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Adding on to this: Please don’t identify only to Mollusca… the bivalve identifiers and gastropod people are oftentimes very different. An exception to this would be shell fragments that probably can’t be ID’d further
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and barnacles might also get confused among Mollusca
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You just gave me a good idea what to ID. Even I can tell Gastropoda and Bivalvia apart. Further question: are all “normal” land snails Stylommatophora?
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Barnacles are crustaceans. You’re saying some are misidentified as mollusca?
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Yes, that happens, especially with goose barnacles.
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Most normal-looking land snails and a lot of normal-looking slugs are Stylommatophora, but not all of either group, so please don’t be tempted to lump them all under that taxon.
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We also have volcano barnacles - I can imagine someone thinking they are ‘limpets’. We have keyhole limpets. Nature keeps us on our toes.
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I’ve been IDing observations stuck at mollusca the last day - it’s pretty fun! But there are definitely tough calls.
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Observing notifications is what I do, even if it is a bit inconvenient (I have to click the bubble in the top right corner and rightclick all individually - it woud be easier if there was a normal page with an URL that shows them as a list). This is something I must do - otherwise slime molds IDd as fungi or bugs IDd as beetles would stick until enough people override my errors. I try to keep my error rate at about 1% - more would create unnecessary work for others, less would mean dumping lots of stuff into Arthropoda or Mammalia which seems to be about as useful as Plantae (based on seeing how rarely I get refinement notifications for those).
And I unfollow the observations that have been refined by somebody else but the observer (if I moved a beetle from unknown to Coleoptera and somebody refined it into Carabeidae, I don’t want additional notifications if it gets refined further (unless I particularly like that animal)).
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