Thanks very much for this information.
It took me a while to figure this out, too!
1 Like
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.
3 Likes
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??
1 Like
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,
1 Like
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
1 Like
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.
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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.
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.