I submit an Observation. BUT, nothing really happens. My observation is not research grade because nobody notices.
I am an engineer/geophysicist by trade… now I am retired.
I want to be a part of this global project… iNaturalist. But how do I do it?
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Can you please share a link to the observation so folks can look at it to see if potentially there is any kind of issue.
Sometimes the answer is simply patience to wait for folks to review it. It is also highly dependant upon what and where it is. North American records get looked at quicker and by more folks, since the 3 largest national communities on the site are in order the US, Canada and Mexico.
Different families also have different rates of being successfully identified, things like birds, mammals, reptiles, ‘charismatic’ insects have rates that can be 90% or higher. A much lower percent of plants and fungi get identified.
I tried to look up your account on the website, but could not find it, so perhaps you are using a different name on the forum here than on the app/site ?
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MAJUSARET is my user name on iNaturalist
Can you post a link to one of your observations?
I think you need to use the dashes in your user name for people to find you. maj-usa-ret
Some of your observations are research grade so they have been identified by others.
Arrowhead Flatworm is missing a location.
For the others, it is mostly a matter of when someone who knows those species is doing identifications.
Sometimes it is quite a while before that happens with some species.
Welcome to iNat.
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Things like robber flies are certainly going to take a little longer. There actually are one or two really strong identifiers of them on the site, I’ve had them look at some of mine, but it’s not something that a lot of general naturalists are going to have too solid a footing on. Sometimes it is just a matter of waiting until they decide to take a look through the outstanding records in their areas of expertise.
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1 other thing to note, insects, plants, fungi, and fish usually take a little longer for identifications due to lack of active users with expertise on those specific creatures, also the taxonomy can be difficult to narrow down sometimes for highly diverse groups like insects and fish. apart from that, welcome to inaturalist!
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Thank you! Your username on iNaturalist has hyphens, which is why we couldn’t find you at first, but this helps.
Looks like your plant observations have already been confirmed, but the invertebrates have not. As @cmcheatle mentioned, some groups of life tend to get quicker attention than others, and many invertebrates are at the slow end of the spectrum. You are doing everything right, including identifying to the smallest taxonomic group that you can.
As @connietaylor mentioned, sometimes an accurate location can help, as some identifiers focus on particular geographic areas. The observation you linked has a very large (in)accuracy circle around it, maybe you can reel it in a bit?
So yes, I’ll just echo that some observations will take more patience than others, and welcome to iNaturalist!
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I agree with all of the previous suggestions and wish to add that another way to get your observations “noticed” by other users is to join iNaturalist Projects that align with the geographic area where you will be making most of your observations and/or that focus on taxa that are of interest to you. A great place to start for your area would probably be something like Biodiversity of Alabama (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/biodiversity-of-alabama). This project attempts to document observations of any organism made within the state of Alabama. Once you join the project, you can have all of the observations you upload automatically added to this project. Other members of the project will see them and thus make it more likely to get comments and ID suggestions/confirmations. This helped me tremendously when I was a new iNat user; it was also fun to see what other users in my state were observing.
Another suggestion: Confirm or make identifications for observations posted by other users. The more active and visible you are in iNaturalist, the more likely that your own observations will be noticed.
Happy observing!
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One minor comment, your records are automatically in that project, even without joining it. Collection projects like this automatically collect all records that meet their parameters, whether you are a member or not. The project badge will show on your observation only if you join, but the record is automatically added regardless.
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