That visualization is essentially my squint-and-guess method refined. Since I live in Massachusetts in the US, I might as well keep on churning through the Unknowns in the northeastern US.
I’ll be chipping away at the red line of unknowns that appears to coincide with the Appalachian Mountains range in the eastern US. I’m wondering what’s under the “hot spot” over in Europe between Poland and Norway.
Yeah, the location looks like Denmark possibly, but I couldn’t think of a reason why it would be a hot spot. School project makes total sense! I grew up ‘nearby’ in northern Germany so I may have to check it out. I could probably recognize a few things especially common weeds and garden plants.
Not there is a slight bias in this map from including observations with no iconic taxa; most notable difference is the state of Wyoming which currently has no ‘unknowns’ and <1 page of state of matter life, but a lot of bacteria/archaea observations thanks to thermal features in Yellowstone. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&project_id=unknowns-and-state-of-matter
Shows a gap there
The unknowns map was generated from that same project that excluded the no iconic taxa. Only reason I can think up why it was not showing up blank was when the screenshot was grabbed or side state overlap and how close in I was for the grab. Probably my timing vs yours when looking at it.
[edit: I just updated the map above]
A someone who lives in Denmark and does occasional Unknown IDs here, I haven’t seen that much by way of school projects in the backlog. I suspect it might simply be down to lack of IDers doing coarse sorting - if I were more systematic about it rather than just occasionally checking it for things I know what are I alone would probably easily be able to keep up with the influx at current levels (though of course after that many would just keep lingering at “agaricomycetes” or “magnoliopsida” or whatever), but the backlog is massive, especially compared to neighbouring countries.
Even if you just know a few common plants you’d definitely be able to help out at lower levels too here, occasionally I look up some fairly charismatic plant in the backlog and there’ll be several hundred observations of them stuck at “needs ID” (I don’t know how this part compares to elsewhere though).
I don’t know honestly. I suspect a lot of it might be a lack of local experts on iNat because we have a fairly robust set of national sites for reporting observations both general ones (Naturbasen, Arter) and more taxonomically narrow ones (e.g. SvampeAtlas for Fungi s.lat.). Additionally these have traditionally been built with a core assumption that most users would be able to confidently ID most of their reported observations and ID-help being more forum-like, with the result that there isn’t really a general culture of systematically reviewing IDs in bulk and for those groups where that sort of thing has been built up in recent years it’s all concentrated on the national sites with no reason to switch because those places might have useful local functionality (e.g. SvampeAtlas has a CV thing that works significantly better than the iNat one on Danish basidiomycetes because it’s been trained specifically on a large number of those) and because that’s where all the experts and powerusers already are.
Oh, national sites are one of biggest reasons for that I’m guessing! I hope more experts will join iNat from all over the world, but at least such major hotspots of them (with relatively low biodiversity) definitely should be all ided. We need to make more campaigns in universities for iders, not observers imo, there’re more than enough people observing as long as backlog is as huge as it is now.
It should be fun! I was curious and got a bit of a start already, although with nearly 25,000 “unknowns” it’s probably just a tiny drop in the bucket. Lots of very identifiable plants in that pool, including plenty that grow as naturalized/invasive species in the eastern US but observed in their native habitat for a change. I’m glad we discovered Denmark’s need for IDs.