Thanks very much for this information.
It took me a while to figure this out, too!
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I give you the words of Euell Gibbons, writing about foraging wild foods:
A forager doesn’t have to be a graduate botanist. You don’t have to be able to call every plant in the woods by its Latin name before you are ready to begin. As soon as you can be sure that you recognize a single edible specimen, you are ready to start gathering food.
The same principle applies to contributing identifications. If you can be certain of just one taxon, you are ready to start providing identifications of that taxon.
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Identify whatever taxa you know well enough to give a confident ID on - even if you don’t know the exact species, narrowing it down to order, family or genus is still helpful!
You could also help tackle the massive pile of ‘unknowns’, even giving them a broad identification (bird, plant, insect, mammal) helps massively to help knowledgeable people see and identify these observations!
then follow your notifications and make it your learning curve for the next level.
It’s rewarding to look back 2 or 3 years, and see how much you have learnt. How differently you react to what was, something planty??
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You need to click on “filter” (to the right of the box where you enter “location”) and check the box for “needs ID”.
Interesting question. My field of expertise (or familiarity at any rate) is forest trees. I do however have a couple of old reference books with good illustrations and useful keys. I sometimes use these to ID ferns and reef fish of the Indo-Pacific region, even though I am not an expert in either of these branches of biology,
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The link to your iNat profile is broken
https://www.inaturalist.org/people/3744619
There are tree projects that would welcome help?
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/search?utf8=✓&q=trees
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Incidentally, has there been a decline in identification activity recently? The most recently uploaded observation of mine to make Research Grade was uploaded February 13, more than a month ago. Granted, I don’t expect my esoteric dandelions to be confirmed anytime soon, but not all of my observations since then have been difficult ones.
It didn’t, but in many parts of the world spring is on full, so number of observations went up since the winter time.
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Location makes a huge difference. My trip to Death Valley is 53% RG two weeks later, while my New Mexico observations for all 2023 are 32% RG. About 300 verifiable in each category.
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Like Marina said I believe the season plays a part in it. Spring is just starting in the Northern Hemisphere which means that IDers are about to get inundanted with tons of bird, butterfly, and bee observations, not to mention all the spring wildflowers. During the winter there is time for IDers of these groups to dabble in other groups since all the spring species are gone.
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I wanted to give an update to a post I made in February 2023 (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-best-contribute-to-identifications-looking-for-advice/39559) about how to best contribute IDs to iNat. I thought I’d share my progress in case it’s helpful to others.
My area of expertise is birds of Eastern North America, but I found that they didn’t need a lot of help being identified. I was looking for other ways to contribute. Here’s what I ended up doing:
–I started with trying to identify my own observations that were not RG. This was quite a challenge, and I learned so much that ended up making be a better identifier. I started with trees and moved on to flowering plants, mammals, herps, mollusks, insects, etc. For each area I used a field guide I had, purchased a field guide (eBay is a great source), or used agricultural extension websites for a lot of cultivated plants. Sometimes I used Google image search. I also made notes in each observation of how I arrived at the identification I did or why I could not make an ID to species. This made me a better observer as well because I learned what features of organisms need to be shown in order to be identified. It also improved my photo quality.
–Next I experimented with identifying plants that I know well from my own garden. Unfortunately, most of the plants I felt confident enough to ID are cultivated species, so I didn’t feel like this was making much of an impact.
–Then I moved on to identifying unknowns that were more than six months old in my state. THIS is where I found my niche. I was surprised at how many identifications I could make based on the experience I picked up from trying to ID my own observations. I also couldn’t believe the hidden gems I found that needed ID. Some examples include: recordings of Chuck-will’s Widows, photos of pitcher plants, an uncommon butterfly identified as a plant, and many plants I marked cultivated because of specific local knowledge.
–Now I’ve moved on to identifying plants in my state with needs ID ranked high to low. It’s very satisfying to see how many I can move to the correct family even if I can’t provide a full ID.
–I also plan to start working on unidentified recordings of bird songs in my state since I can ID by sound.
Just wanted to share what worked for me as a thank you to all of you who provided great feedback to get me on my way. Happy iNatting!
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Great to hear! Keep at it. :)
Wonderful - making a rewarding difference!
Lane, you did a lot! 
For example, let’s pause after your first 4 sentences:
If every iNatter did that, then we would have hardly any “Needs ID” on the website! 
Great job, sir! 
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Since this was an update to one of your earlier threads, I merged your update here and reopened the thread so the conversation can continue.
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I recently found a way to further optimize my coarse ID speed (I want to produce maximum correct output per hour invested): If I see something obvious (i.e. insect, bird, …) marked as unknown, I open the observations of that observer and walk thru them. This gives me a much higher percentage of identifiable things than the usual method (which for me is walking the global unknowns for a single day, containing mostly weeds and trees).
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