When Allison (@kestrel) challenged us to set goals, I optimistically said I would do 30 days of Odonata IDs and annotations, looking for nymphs. I checked my activity today and discovered I’ve missed two days. What? I thought I had missed only one! But the Identification list does not lie.
How are you doing on your ID-a-thon goals? Humble brags welcome.
How are you checking your activity to know days were missed?
Still chewing the Great Southern Bioblitz backlog for Southern Africa. Down the taxon levels to my last one - which is Family. 11K reviewed, 2.2K to go.
Then CNC 4K Unknowns. Then down to Family again - maybe not.
On the web version you can access the list of IDs you’ve made using the tabs at the top of your dashboard.
On the Android version, there’s a similar feature called Identifications. You have to tap on the Comments icon to see your ID and when you made it.
I said I would do 300 IDs a day. So far, I’ve averaged about 1,140 a day. Maybe I need to get a life?
I thought that was how it was done. I have too many IDs each day to do that. I had hoped a stats option were available.
You can always check your Year in review, which also features a graph showing your number of IDs and you can select individual days.. it’s also not perfect, but works a bit better then scrolling through that ID tab
(exchange my nickname at the end of the url with yours and refresh/ generate with the button on the very end of that page)
https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2025/ajott
As to my goals.. I wrote in that comment section that I would review arachnid level observations that first week, but gave up on it on the first day already 
.. I prefer what I do anyway (more specific spider IDs, sending observationsoff to RG if I can) and will not run out of needs ID any time soon
Not really doing anything special or different because of the ID-a-thon, but I’m currently going through the Unknown / Annelida project, IDing what I can if it hasn’t been already.
Perhaps I could try finishing that until January 15. 86 pages left.
I did not participate in much of ID-a-thon but I would like to discuss one thing:
ID-a-thon was a bad idea, especially if they do it for insects (though it is bad for any taxon)
This is because they are Dryinid wasps that look like mantises, mantises that look like ants, and of course planthoppers whose nymphs can look like antlions and whose adults look like, flies, moths, and what not else, not forgotten are treehoppers which are also equally weird.
If amateurs will get into id’ing these then observations of on taxonomic group will get scattered in to other groups thanks to ID-a-thon misidentifications. We must be careful about this.
And Insects (and Arachnids, crustaceans and other arthropods) are not the only ones, even reptiles can be misidentified by inexperienced people.
So this is a request to @inaturalist to be careful about what they choose as ID-a-thon topics.
I hope what I wrote is meaningful to the community.
8600 of my promised 10 000 IDs reached- looks like I am on track, which is really surprising for me
Goals? What are those? 
In all seriousness I’ve been ID’g but not following the ID a thon rubric.
I haven’t followed the guidance either since I have my own ID groove.
Sounds like you have a darn interesting one to me. Remember: iNat is life.
I understand this. Identifying requires technical expertise.
I think of it like this: the ID community needs more identifiers and one of the ways to get them is to grow our own. This will be messy. Mistakes will be made. AND, there will be people who, because of the ID-a-thon, build their capacity to ID accurately and will find they love to pore over observations to distinguish Dryinid wasps, mantises, ants, plant Hoppers and antlions.
iNat has a very ambitious mission. I see signs that they are leaning into iNat as a tool to advance biodiversity science and conservation through technology without abandoning the mission of connecting people to nature.
To do both of these things together is hard. Really hard. And as someone who runs a nonprofit I think they are doing very well at addressing the fullness of a very ambitious mission.
That’s absolutely incredible!
Since you say you did not participate much, why are you certain that this was a bad idea? Have you seen an increase in misidentifications that are clearly the result of the ID-a-thon? Have you looked at the materials that iNat provided for novice identifiers who wish to participate in it?
I spend most of my time identifying a taxon that gets misidentified a lot, by both users and the CV. What would help me most would be 1) users being more cautious with IDs (recognizing what they don’t know); 2) users withdrawing (not agreeing) when their IDs are corrected; and 3) more users who are familiar with the taxon or willing to put in the time and work to learn it.
For all three of these things to happen, most users benefit from guidance – i.e., a framework in which they can learn how to become responsible IDers. This does not mean never making mistakes along the way, because all of us will inevitably make some. Rather, it is about starting to think about how things are classified and how we determine this. It is also about becoming familiar with community norms and expectations.
Surely a good way for this to happen is not to simply expect users to figure things out on their own, but rather to provide a structured context in which they are walked through the process of IDing, with information about best practices and some tips for sorting organisms into basic groups? Novice IDers might be encouraged to provide low-stakes IDs where mistakes are unlikely to do much harm and provide them an opportunity to learn and get feedback (such as broad sorting of unknowns).
In other words – something like an ID-a-thon.
I admit that I had some misapprehensions when the plans for an ID-a-thon were announced. I have experienced situations when an enthusiastic user starts providing a bunch of IDs based on very little knowledge, and this tends to be rather stressful. For difficult taxa where there is a fairly small community of active identifiers, we generally notice when someone new starts making IDs; we are likely to pay extra attention to this person’s activities until we have some sense of their skills, and if it is clear that they have no idea what they are doing, we will try to communicate with them and get them to change their behavior. This can be a bit fraught because not all new identifiers are aware that they need to check their notifications, so it sometimes takes some time to reach them.
I was a bit concerned that the ID-a-thon might result in having to do this for multiple users all at once. I have not seen this happening, perhaps because users have not been encouraged to simply provide as many IDs as possible, but have been nudged towards certain types of activities.
I should also say that ids in planthoppers are so complicated that Achipecton (Achildae) looks like a Fulgorid, Embolophora and Afrocranus (Delphacidae) looks like Dictyopharids (an actual missed I’ve seen), and of course there is Namsangia (Cicadellinae) which looks like it were more related to Vangama (Evacanthinae) etc.
If they want to grow their community of identifiers, then let me tell you that I took atleast 3-4 years to have a complete understanding of most planthoppers/leafhoppers too. We cannot expect that inexperienced people can make ids without scattering observations of one taxonomic group to the other, and vice versa.
Let me give you an example for what happens when a regular observer is to id an obs (even one of his own) - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/108065117
I see that you id Odonata nymphs, so I bet you thought that the observation linked was a beetle at first. However, it is from a completely different order.
This is perhaps the greatest example I can set for you and others.
But inexperienced people may well be able to correctly ID planthoppers as Auchenorrhyncha, or as Pterygota or Insecta. Nobody has been telling novice IDers to look at a taxon they know nothing about and ID everything to family or genus or species for the ID-a-thon. Quite the contrary.
If the observation was entered without an ID, it would probably not get seen either by planthopper people or by beetle people as long as it remains in “unknown”.
Such tricky observations might also have been incorrectly ID’d by the observer if the observer had entered an ID instead of leaving this field blank – so an inexperienced IDer labelling such an observation as Coleoptera would likely not be doing more harm than would have been the case otherwise. My experience is that insect specialists often recognize commonly confused insects in other orders that resemble their taxon of specialty and can re-ID such observations that end up there by mistake. Is it ideal? No, but mistakes are part of how we learn. And if the inexperienced IDer is participating in the context of an ID-a-thon, they have been told to follow notifications and withdraw their ID if necessary – something that observers often do not realize they should do. How is this making the data worse for IDers?
This is why I help so much with the unknowns. With respect to the planthoppers, I am not familiar with the taxon. However, if I can tell the observation (ob) is an insect, I will mark it as insects in hopes someone who does know will see and ID it.
Actually since I don’t ID beetles or planthoppers that would never show up on anything I would attempt to ID.
It’s not like the ID-a-thon is pointing people to the trickiest taxa. I think you will be able to tell in a week or two just how much, if at all, the ID-a-thon is derailing IDs.
Ok… we will see.
