Because your post suggested that people identifying unknowns are merely sorting into iconic categories without any further thought and patting themselves on the back in the belief that they are making a difference. In my experience this is often not the case, nor has anyone recommended doing this. Many people IDing unknowns are in fact putting time and effort into their IDs and this may not be cognitively less challenging than IDing with a narrower focus.
I would argue that the opposite can be true – if I go through and click “agree” on hundreds of Plantago lanceolata observations in the UK to make them RG and reduce the backlog, as I have done now and again, this is not particularly cognitively challenging because I am assessing a single question – do the photos display a set of usually quite distinctive traits needed to recognize this species. If I am looking at unknowns, I am constantly having to shift gears across different kingdoms, and it is far more likely that I will have to also deal with other challenges such as blurry photos, photos with multiple potential subjects, unmarked cultivated plants, data quality problems, etc. I find this cognitively challenging in a way that focusing on a specific taxon I am familiar with is not.
I have not. Please see my subsequent post. Even if your post was meant to say we should use it as an opportunity to challenge ourselves to try something new, I disagree with the underlying premises – that we are all not already challenging ourselves or learning, or that doing something different necessarily means having more of an impact. For some of us, “carry on” may be the best way we can contribute.
Sure. But some people with expertise are already overwhelmed in the taxa where they have expertise. There is no reason to think their activities will have more of an impact if they switch to IDing taxa where they are novices. There may be reasons why they might wish to do so, whether for the ID-A-Thon or otherwise, but contributing to reducing the overall Needs ID pile on iNat to a greater degree than they were doing already is probably not going to be one of the outcomes; in fact, the opposite may be the case.
This thread started out positive, optimistic and enthusiastic.
On iNat’s blog post people are queueing up to say - I will be doing that taxon in that place or whatever. For identifiers who already spend too many hours a day on iNat it is WONDER FULL to see more active identifiers and identifying. Thank you @yayemaster et al !
I love that enthusiasm, everyone setting goals of their interests and capacity!
I read all the comments till now with interest to know everyone’s opinion on unknowns totally forgetting the point of the thread
thanks to this comment I have got the motivation to push past my limits as well
whereas earlier I was questioning if im being helpful at all
sure there are good points above but I don’t think the point of the ID-a-thon and this thread is to debate what sort of IDing is more useful or productive.
theres no point in arguing what is better and whatnot, at the end we gotta do stuff in our capacity
From what I can tell, yesterday was the first time that daily IDs for others have exceeded 300 000 since the tail end of the CNC. And not many days have even got close to it since.
Apart from that though, I want to learn to ID plants to maybe family or order levels with consistency, so far I can only ID plants to monocots, dicots, ferns, etc. and my lower taxa level IDs are based on the common taxon that all the ‘visually similar‘ CV suggestions belong to, to minimise error on my part.
Is there any resource like a video or guide or smth? I don’t necessarily wish to go in-depth into plants as im more of a bug person but this knowledge will be helpful :)
I mostly do unknowns (due to lack of more detailled knowledge), and here is my trick: instead of slowly walking pages full of weeds (hard to ID, and moving them to dicots interferes with other peoples’ workflow), find a few people who visibly left birds, spiders etc. in “unknown” and walk their observations instead (except observations that are only a few days old, some people make unknowns outside on their phone and later add IDs at the desktop from home). This gives (with very little effort) dozens or even hundreds of other unknowns that can easily ID’d at least coarsely.
Then there is Arachnida. Rarely people dump their observations directly there (except a few mite-shaped things), but laypeople don’t know the difference between harvestmen and spiders and the combination of that is arachnida. A few people (including me) look there regularly, but sometimes we need more votes (two or three more people would be sufficient) to lift a harvestman-misidentified pholcid into spiders or vice versa (once it is there, spider-IDers care about the details).
Yesterday, I had three items on my to-do list: clean up a little snow, wash woodwork before the painter comes, and make iNat IDs. The snow was easy, but I hate washing woodwork (I did do some), so I made lots of IDs - 2,689. Mostly pushing species-level observations to RG, but I also moved some observations from genus to species and IDed a few Unknowns. Mostly plants in eastern North America, mostly really common, easy-to-identify weeds. I continue to be surprised at how many such observations hang around for years before getting an ID.
Today and tomorrow, I’m going to the herbarium, so I won’t get anywhere near as many IDs done, but I’ll try to do some. Anything is better than washing woodwork!!
But some of us may be already spending more time than we should IDing and still struggle with the feeling that this is not enough. Given that, it is not helpful to get additional external messaging that frames our contributions in terms of “we should be doing more and doing better”.
Rather than, say: Great to have more company
or: How can we support each other
or: This is what I’ve decided to work on
or: What have you learned so far
I was pushing back at the idea that there is some way we “should” be participating and that this should, in some sense, be directed towards optimization. There also seems to be an implication that what is “difficult” is more valuable than what is easy. Some people will find it motivating to look at numbers; some people will enjoy setting themselves challenges. Others may wish to approach it other ways. What we find “fun” or “stressful” is going to be very individual and we’re all coming from different places.
For some people, labelling unknowns with iconic taxa may be what they need to do right now. It may or may not be something that they find cognitively easy. For other people other activities might be more appealing. As long as they are IDing responsibly (not making reckless IDs; following notifications in case of mistakes), I don’t see anything wrong with people labelling plants as plants, if this is how they choose to engage. I know some people view this differently, but I’d prefer to see people enthusiastically entering “plantae” than not entering anything at all because they are afraid of being negatively judged. Everything I’ve seen suggests that those who stick with IDing generally move on to being able to provide more specific IDs over time.
I usually have 30 to 90 minutes before my eyes go and I start making mistakes. That is 30 to 90 easy identifications or just one or two tricky ones.
I wish someone told me when I started, so here is my guide (just in case) :
If you know what it is and there are no lookalikes: identify.
If there are lookalikes or you’re not sure, use a key. Some terms might be unfamiliar, there are glossaries to explain it. iNat does not provide resources, need to ask a friendly expert.
100% of Rock Pigeons in North America are Feral Pigeons. (We know this because we know how they got here. Wild-type Rock Pigeons don’t really spread on their own.) So, if you can confirm that the bird in the photo is a Rock Pigeon, you can confidently identify it as Columba livia var. domestica.
You can do the same thing in Australia and New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Asia, and most islands. For other areas, you need to know a little more about the range (but not that much more).
Question: If one were to retroactively change settings, for example to eliminate notifications on agreeing ID’s, would those notifications disappear from the list? Just thinking that if so, it might be a good way to filter down to just those that actually require attention. Because otherwise, that’s a lot!
