Has anyone used inat data to determine the level of difficulty to ID a given species?

you could sort of expand on the effort here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-things-are-misidentified-as-large-milkweed-bug/12571. instead of just showing how many identifications end up at other taxa, you could also incorporate the number of identifications that end up at the taxon of interest (and maybe at something higher than species).

this approach may be of limited value at a species level because there are many taxa that end up at higher-than-species ranks whether due to disagreements or due to situations where it’s hard to determine what the species is. however, it can be useful at higher levels: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/recruiting-more-identifiers/2388/294.

if you were to combine this with the earlier approach, then maybe you could do something that makes more sense at a species level though.

to be really useful though, all this may need to be tempered by some sort of geography component, which could be hard do though. for example, a black and white Chickadee where i am is probably a Carolina Chickadee, but in other parts of the US, folks might have to do a lot more work to differentiate between Carolina and Black-capped.

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