Me too. For beetles … beet works.
Someone must have to pick mites out of my spiders - but those IDs do move.
That is a bit daunting
Arachnida in the Pre-Maverick project
over 36K
PS we no longer move them to the archived project, so it won’t be quite as many.
Funny, I habitually start by looking at the UNKNOWNs in my neck of the woods, to at least ballpark the thing. If I don’t know, I normally get by with moving up the taxonomic tree, as spiphany said.
One recent example of UNKNOWN I came across: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/236940834
This Unknown in my area may prove especially challenging to resolve:
It is seven days old. No sound or any other information was provided.
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I have occasionally accidentally created such observations in the app by doing something that automatically triggered an observation to be uploaded even though I hadn’t entered any data.
I don’t think you need to do anything about it, though I suppose you could leave a comment for the user letting them know that they have an observation without media. Observations without media can be easily excluded from searches (and I believe are normally excluded by default), so they shouldn’t pose a problem for the workflow of people who ID unknowns.
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Thanks for the suggestion. I have added the following comment to the observation:
This Unknown observation without any media appears to have been submitted in error.
The same user does have some other very good observations in the vicinity.
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Good for you. Not everyone is so fortunate to have so seldom encountered mysterious blobs and formations that they were unable to make sense of in spite of doing their best to figure it out.
We are asked to assume that people mean well. It seems to me that this also includes not judging people and not assuming that they are stupid or lazy because they don’t do things the way you would.
It is not just a question of figuring out how to use the interface to add an ID, but figuring out how iNat works more generally – understanding what is expected, why one should add an ID, and what ID to add. As others in this thread have pointed out, new users may not understand that they can add a general ID like “beetles” if they don’t know exactly what they saw, or they may think it is silly to do so. If one doesn’t have a firm grasp of taxonomy, even the process of choosing an appropriate ID may be confusing and overwhelming.
Not everybody comes to iNat with previous experience of nature observation. Not everybody will have signed up for iNat as a way to digitally record and share biodiversity data. Some people may think it is just an app for taking pictures of things and finding out what it is, with an added element of “see how many species you can find”. They may not realize that iNat is a community or that observations are ID’d by other users, so it may not occur to them adding an initial ID to their observation will help other users find it. Some people may be just playing around with the app and seeing what it can do.
I will repeat: for new users, this is usually because they do not understand how iNat works, not because they are lazy or trying to make more work for IDers. I agree that responses like “I know it’s a spider, I want to know what kind it is” are not particularly polite towards the IDer who was trying to help, but generally it is because the user does not realize that IDers are volunteering their time and does not understand why people are adding “obvious” IDs.
It seems to me you have two options in such cases: You can be generous, remind yourself that the rudeness is not based on ill intent, and explain to them the purpose of broad IDs and help them realize that they are interacting with a community and IDers are not merely providers of services.
Or, if you find it too annoying to deal with such observations, you are perfectly free to skip them. Nobody is obligated to ID anything.
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maybe it would be helpful if inat had a function that wouldn’t submit anything to the community at all unless there was something entered into the description to let folks know what they should be looking at, that way, they could still let it submit as “unknown” for people who legitimately don’t know what they’re looking at but give some direction for identifiers to help them out.
If they just want to save something for themselves, by all means, have inat save that record for them. but sending it out for a community ID and inclusion into the larger databases? have little popups telling folks to include missing data.
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I have really benefitted from a neighbor and plant enthusiast who has again and again taken the time to add links to botany keys and other resources in comments of my observations. I imagine that there is some point on the learning curve in which new users have caught the “iNat bug” and ready to learn more, and subtle mentorship attuned to their interests could make a big difference. So many people have taken the time to do that for me!
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It is a delicate balance between
Too Much Information
and
Tell Me More!
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I was thinking that the icons (with a little bit of description) would be helpful on the upload process. “What did you observe? Click the appropriate icon. “Can you be more specific. Please enter species/taxon or view suggestions? “ There should be a hint that entering location makes the id more specific and if they can’t identify the y could search one level higher.
I know I didn’t realize at first that I could type in “bird” or “Aves” and leave it at that. I thought I had to pick a specific species or leave the id blank. I’m giving animal examples but this could be really helpful for plants which see to be the bulk of the unknowns.
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You can add comments from iNat’s Frequently Used Responses here - https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses - if you don’t want to write your own.
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This is great, thank you!
I think this is a very common point of confusion for new users. I teach and entomology class and have the kids use inat to record their sightings, and even after giving them a tutorial to explain how to enter an ID, some of them still leave the ID blank and tell me “but I didn’t know what species it was yet”. So I bet a lot of newer users are in the same boat.
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This is not my attitude per se. It is what I imagine the majority of people around the world from all walks of life will think. Plants are much more diverse than just green stuff, just like insects are much more than just little things with many legs. As an example. How many people call every creepy crawly a bug? Even scorpions, centipedes, spiders, etc.
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Of course. It has Too Many Legs, it’s A Bug.
Huh. This is what I do. I’m not a very prolific IDer, but I look through Unknown observations from “English is an official language” countries from users who created their accounts in the last few weeks on my lunch break. My goal is to ID down to Class or beyond ussually, although I occasionally just do a “that’s a dicot :)” or “that’s a fungus :)” ID. Whenever I ID in this specific (new user, unknown ID) category I paste in this comment when I add a non-species level ID:
"Hi, welcome to iNaturalist! Thank you so much for contributing this observation :)
Even if you don’t know the exact species of what you have observed, you can search for and select a higher level identification, such as “plants (kingdom Plantae)” or “insects (class Insecta)”. I’m not quite sure which species this is, but this general identification will help other people who might know the species find your observation. Many people helping identify observations on iNaturalist filter the observations by the group of species they know how to identify, like “plants” or “insects”, and this general ID will help them find it more quickly. If you’re interested in learning more about how identifications progress on iNaturalist, you can read more here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started#identify
You can add an ID to an observation by clicking “add ID.” You can also use computer vision to help you ID by clicking “suggestions” and scrolling through options. For example if computer vision suggests several different species of hoverfly or several different species of oak trees, you could add a higher level ID for hoverflies (family Syrphidae) or oaks (genus Quercus)."
Reactions range from: no response, adding an ID agreeing with mine, or (rarely) adding a “thanks!” comment. Sometimes another user will say “yeah I search by spiders/ferns/whatever” so this ID helped me find this observation.
I thought I was being helpful to some degree. Curious to watch this thread.
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Marking “unknown” is a valid choice if done thoughtfully, just like any other ID. I don’t read something negative into it unless it is clearly a user who is spamming, and by that I mean not making an effort (over time) to make their observations better (clear photo, one organism, etc.). INaturalist can be an intimidating place for new users, especially if those who ID don’t make any effort to give friendly feedback (which I know can be exhausting), but the smallest bones of encouragement mean a lot to people trying to learn, (and they probably wouldn’t be making observations in the first place if they didn’t want to learn and contribute.)
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Do you mean it is easier because they are already on the iPad or because the app is easier? If it is just because they are on your iPad, can’t you open the website in the browser on your iPad?
Things we would colloquially call “tree” or “bush” are usually either Dicots or Conifers. If you don’t know which then you would have to put an ID of Vascular Plants to include both.
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If you mean that its stupid to bully people for using the CV for unfamiliar organisms, that too. It can be difficult to make good IDs which can make the CV very helpful to start IDing something.
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