It is not sciency, but you can get a gut feeling for how effective your IDs are by following notifications. Later your gut will warn you which broad IDs die in limbo, and which bounce back ‘tomorrow’ with a finer ID.
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As someone relatively new to INat myself, and feeling a bit guilty building up a lot of observations and very few identifications. I really like the idea of addressing a few unknowns as a way to get started! What a wonderful idea! But if a lot of unknowns are people brand new to INat, my words could count a lot to the observers impression of the community and likelihood to keep going. Not sure that I’m ready for that.
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Depending on what interests you - you can also … pick beetles out of insects, or orchids out of monocots, or ? Or for a species you know, add the second ID to take it to RG. Many many ways to help. Or annotate, larva for caterpillars.
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Yes! You answered a question I did not know I was asking, but has been on my mind.
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Come to this thread
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/annotation-sunday/55342
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I have this Identify page bookmarked for when I want to do Unknowns. Using &identified=false gives you true Unknowns instead of the catchall version the Iconic Taxon provides. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?order_by=random&identified=false
If you order by Ascending or Descending you can also see the page numbers.
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One point that I haven’t seen brought up here is that even if the observation getting a broad ID sits at that broad ID for ages, the fact that that observation is out of the “unknown” pool may have the effect of increasing the efficiency with which other unknowns get ID’d.
There are clearly some taxa which are well-known by the “unknown identifiers”, and they seem to go through the unknowns and pop lots of these straight to species. Other taxa just aren’t known well but the unknown ID-ers, so your options are to either leave it at unknown forever, or place it at a lower level and hope for the best. While it may be years before that observation gets a species ID, the fact that it’s been pulled out of the unknown pool means the unknown IDers have one fewer thing to click through. Might not seem like a big deal, but we’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of observations, and even 1% of those getting pulled out of unknown is going to save a lot of clicks and time. No one going through “unknowns” is likely to know how to differentiate between similar tiny brown moths or nondescript flies, so popping them to Order or Class gets them out of the way to condense down the type of thing that unknown IDers are good at. Birds have lots of active identifiers, so clicking “bird” actually does give a substantially better shot at an ID. Throwing a distinctive flower you don’t recognize from Unknown to Plants might not really help anything though- someone else trawling unknowns will certainly recognize it.
So yeah, there’s a lot of nuance here. I’m sure some taxa are just as likely to get IDs in unknown as they are elsewhere, others are never going to get straight to species out of unknown unless you win the lottery and a gelechiid expert happens to be clicking through 100,000 unlabeled shrooms and flowers and sees a Filatima photo among them. And it differs by location too- in Africa, plant ID requests generally go to unknown to be reviewed, and “plant kingdom” is where the unidentifiable ones go to languish for eternity. So putting “plant” on an observation there may do more harm than good for your ID chances. The workflow of most identifiers is different there.
But trying to explain all this nuance to a new user who just wants to know what type of spider they found this morning is overkill. If you have to boil down “which is better- taking a stab at an ID or letting it at unknown?” into the simplest answer possible for a brand new user, I’d still say “take a stab at it” is the best we can do. Is that always the most efficient option? Of course not. But it’s the best “short answer” I can come up with.
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I agree with this. When I ID unknowns, there are some things I don’t touch. If “kingdom fungi” or “vascular plants” is the best I can do, I leave it for someone else.
That being said, “order Diptera” and “family Formicidae” IDs rarely get follow up, but I make them anyway because for nondescript and low-resolution photos, that’s often the best ID possible, and I want to get all those blurry sidewalk ants out of the Unknown pool to make life easier on the mushroom experts and botanists that frequent the unknown pages.
So I focus my unknown ID efforts on two ends of the spectrum- stuff I can ID to a pretty specific level, and stuff that will probably never get ID’d to a very specific level, especially by the unknown ID club.
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Yes. It takes time and experience to learn to be corrected without a meltdown of confidence.
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And some of us never learn to take instruction! Speaking from personal experience.
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We clearly disagree. The CV has gotten better and can often get things at least to the right order or family, even if the wrong genus in that order or family. So a disagreeing ID would only bump it back to order or family; not the end of the world, and still more useful than Forever Unknown.
I could say the same regarding using the CV if they don’t know.
And yet that’s what a lot of participants here are complaining about – “blindly” trusting the CV. As if a disagreement that keeps it at the order or family level is somehow worse than nothing at all.
Anything the CV might confuse it with is in the same botanical family. So maybe it’s pinesap or sweet pinesap, no biggie.
The CV can get that one to genus.
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I often say “fungi” (there was a tutorial in the forum somewhere which explained what to do, at the moment I just remember Agaricomyotina is the specimen is properly mushroom-shaped and boletales if in addition the underside of the hat has pores instead of gills). I don’t do this to weeds for well-known reasons.
At the moment I walk thru Arachnida with low=class. Most are unrecognizable blurry blobs, most of the rest are “webs” or “cocoons” that might be spiderwebs, spider egg sacs, (slime) molds, caterpillar nests or mite nests, I leave these alone (just mark as reviewed) unless I can tell it is a spiderweb. Only then come real animals, many people seem to think that Arachnida means “spiders”, these are easy to split into araneomorphae, mygalomorphae or opiliones (of course I say salticid, theridiid etc. if I know and I enjoy the rare amblypygi there). That’s more fun than unknowns (the pages aren’t full of weeds and fungi), but it will be over soon since there are only about 5k such obs. And many of them stay Arachnida because of disagreements over pholcids vs. harvestmen due to insufficient majority, we just need votes there.
I’m telling this only to justify my belief that saying “fungi” is ok - maybe somebody else does the same to them.
Hint: the autocompletion helps a lot in the taxon field. “o” becomes odonata, “typ” araneomorphae, “myg” mygalomorphae, “le” lepidoptera. A few more require cursor-down like “noc”, “geo”, “aran”. Other useful ones are “salti”, “fabac”, “cruc” (this gives crucifera, the obsolete name of Brassicaceae). For beetles I type the german “Käfer”, that’s the shortest I found so far. Maybe I should learn more foreign languages, the feature seems to accept everything.
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There is a difference between leaving something on a coarse level and adding an incorrect ID: unless one carefully watches one’s notifications, a wrong ID needs 3 votes to be rescued, a coarse one needs just one. Arachnida is full of harvestmen waiting for the third vote because the observer misidentified them as pholcids.
And their current ID of Arachnids is still more accurate than “Unknown.” We know they are arachnids.
I Would Choose Plant
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I agree with that. But people were too eager to add a fine ID beyond their knowledge, and that now requires three other people to fix. Just having written Arachnida would have been optimal, even pulling them out of unknown can be done by one person.
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I agree with that way of doing things with the caveat that when they do so, they follow up on that ID and are willing to make changes as others chime in on their ID’s.
If you are posting observations* and are never planning on looking back, editing or following up, I would rather you leave as Unknown…
*EDIT - ID’s was changed for observations - which is what I meant
In one of @ken_ohio 's examples, Ghost Pipe, people who don’t know about nature are likely to think it is a fungus. I would much rather they use the CV which will put it in Genus Monotropa (which, incidentally, is in the Family Ericaceae). Otherwise, when someone who knows what it is comes along, it will bump back to “Life” because of the kingdom-level disagreement.
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I think many kinds might do that; try sticking some frass in water and see what happens.
Thanks so much! This is exactly the kind of helpful information that would be nice in a small tutorial on the app.
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