I am fairly new to iNat and not an expert in any particular field, but I recently discovered that even I can help get Observations IDed.
It started with the City Nature Challenge. I participated in a web conference after the weekend to help get more Observations in NYC to Research Grade. The organizer suggested that those of us who don’t have a specialty could help steer Unknowns to a better ID. It turns out (most of you probably know this) that experts search for Observations in their area of expertise–and that new users often don’t think “Plant” is enough of an ID to be worth using, or maybe they haven’t figured out ID at all.
So I IDed a bunch of Unknowns. Some of them got refined to better identifications.
This weekend I tackled a bunch more Unknowns. I found about half a dozen dandelions that were not IDed by the observer! You don’t need to be an expert to ID common local weeds, and you’d be surprised how many of them need identifying. (I have also come to suspect that this is not due to the user’s lack of knowledge about nature but rather their unfamiliarity with using iNaturalist. There is a collection of scripts you can use or adapt to educate users about improving their Observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses.)
Imagine my glee this morning when I had 15 notifications, almost all because something I’d dragged out of Unknown limbo had been IDed.
Also, if you don’t feel confident working at the species level, check out this recent discussion: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/help-inat-phenology-life-stage-charting-even-if-not-expert/11968
Do you know the difference between alive and dead? Flowering or not? Can you recognize an egg? You might be more “expert” than you think you are.
Just observe the caveats mentioned elsewhere in this discussion and don’t identify anything to a greater degree of accuracy than you are sure of. I’ve come to think of it not as a one-time ID, but as steering unidentified Observations toward a better ID down the road.