How can they get to RG? Do you add a disagreeing id, leave a comment and mark it “as good as can be”? They should be casual.
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It happens when enough people ID the organism in the first picture, ignoring all the other pictures in the observation. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times myself and routinely find some when I look through RG observations for my area for errors. I usually add a comment to let everyone know that there are more pictures of a variety of organisms and often someone will change or withdraw their ID in response to that. Occasionally, though a lot less frequently, the observer will fix it.
I think some people tend to ID from just first pictures alone and may not even look at the additional ones. It might be a time-saving thing again, or new identifiers lacking experience and putting an ID on something they recognize in the first picture. I always look at all pictures on an observation before adding or confirming IDs and I think it’s important to leave comments to alert others if there is an issue like multiple organisms.
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If you mark it, it won’t go to RG and won’t be seen, if it’s already RG when you find it - tag other iders and if there’re too many species ids, first mark it as “can be improved”, so it goes to needs id first.
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I am definately guilty of IDing from the first picture only in many cases… I often ID species that I can confirm by tumbnail alone and don’t even open the observation (e.g. most recently I went through a lot of unmisunderstanding Argiope-obs) and yes, it saves me a hack of time during IDing.
I am always happy to go back on my IDs if I get tagged for some reason, though.
I have learnt to be very wary of any obs with multiple photos. Even long term users sometimes miss That photo which should have been a standalone.
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I also miss those observations with multiple species. I’m sorry. It is a problem, but easy to do when IDing fast.
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This is a huge problem for microscopic organisms; I would advise against trusting the iNaturalist suggested ID for anything microscopic. This is an area where even experts sometimes have difficulty placing an organism in the correct kingdom (yes, kingdom!) e.g. “algae” - a term applied to organisms in the completely separate kingdoms of plants, bacteria, and chromists, yet often difficult to visually place! Research grade IDs are a bit of a rarity among us microscopists on the site, as often made by the ignorant (then confirmed by the naïve who think “agree” is a “like” button) as by the experts. And there are so few of us rigorous identifiers in that sector. So the algorithm has a very small set of poor quality data to work with in making its suggestions.
In short, to more directly answer your question: the smaller the dataset, the more detrimental the poor identifications.
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As for the Ageratina split, according to http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=1&taxon_id=250066013 it is “Phyllaries 3–5 mm, apices not cuspidate” versus “Phyllaries 4–7 mm, apices cuspidate to acuminate”. Browsing through some of the observations, a lot of them look acuminate to me whether or not they are in the right geography, so I guess this is a case where I’m not sure how good field ID can get (and/or someone can do the ID, just not me).
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I don’t know how it works on the app, but in my browser, simply moving my cursor onto the observation will cause it to divide into thumbnails of the first four photos. That way, I can see at a glance when there are multiple species involved.
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