First of all, thank you to everyone who helps maintain this amazing database and generously shares their knowledge.
I’m an underwater macro photographer, and over the years I’ve uploaded a large number of observations. I’ve noticed that whenever I upload a new batch, the observations usually receive attention and ID suggestions within the first day or so. After that, however, they tend to disappear into history.
If I’m lucky, most of them eventually reach Research Grade. But many observations receive only a single suggestion or remain unidentified, and then they rarely seem to get seen again. As a result, I now have quite a large number of observations that still don’t have a confirmed identification.
I’m wondering if there’s a recommended way to bring older observations back to people’s attention, or if there’s an existing feature or community process that helps surface unidentified observations so others can take another look.
I’d really appreciate any suggestions or advice. Thank you!
I’m a pretty active identifier and I don’t know of any process that brings older observations back to the attention of identifiers (well, except for one plant project in the northeastern US). Fairly often, I’ll focus on one species or genus I know well in my region of interest and I’ll look at all of the Needs ID observations, back as far as they go. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about underwater organisms, so I’m no help there.
However, if an observation has been sitting around for a couple of months without any identifications and you’re pretty sure it can in fact be IDed, tag one or two of the top identifiers for that species in the region where you made the observations and ask them politely to confirm or correct your ID. That’s the best I can sugest, I’m afraid. It can’t hurt to ID observations for other underwater observers, as well, because sometimes observers will “thank” you for your IDs by IDing some of your observations.
If someone made a more specific suggestion than you were able to make, you could ask them what information/resources they used so that you could use that same information to check and confirm the ID on your own
as she said – ID for others, who like you, wait for IDs (from others). Sort by date observed and ascending, then you can focus on older obs. All identifiers are volunteers, and ‘overwhelmed’ by a flood of obs.
https://www.inaturalist.org/stats click the 3 month view which includes CNC
But this is what I find most interesting. Despite the obs coming in that holds steady around 6 million
For the most part, there aren’t enough identifiers in the world to get all observations that can be ID’d to research grade, or even identified at all. So resurfacing those older ID’s comes at the expense of new observations, unless more identifiers are recruited to ID those older observations.
My recommendation would be to tag someone that you think is knowledgeable and interested in specific observations that you think can be ID’d further, or are noteworthy. Or try to convince some friends to join iNaturalist and contribute ID’s!
I think you end up depending on the initiative of others to seek out old observations for identification. I don’t do a lot of ID work but recently have been looking at specific genera and species of moths and going through the entire catalog of individuals. Granted, it’s not very difficult when most genera only have a few hundred or less observations, but it does bring some satisfaction taking a genus that was in disarray and bring some degree of order to it. It also lets you see the common mistakes the CV makes.
I tend to ID the newest observations first, however I do also go by the oldest fairly frequently. The issue with a lot of old IDs is that they just can’t be identified, lots of course can but plenty cannot or are particularly tricky. Due to that I only really sort by oldest if I have plenty of time, otherwise you only end up identifying a handful of observations when I could identify hundreds of new ones in that time
I think a good compromise is to sort by random. Sorting by oldest is going to more or less show the same set of observations for everyone doing a sufficiently similar search, so often the first few pages are observations that have been looked at many, many times (by others sorting by oldest) but are still stuck at Needs ID, presumably because they are extremely tricky. In my experience sorting by random is much more likely to yield the occasional easily identifiable observation that just slipped through the cracks.
That being said, if you’re extremely confident with your ID skills in a taxon that might be a good reason to sort by oldest. Exactly because these tend to be the hardest observations, you might be uniquely suited to either identify them or be confident you can tick the “no, it’s as good as it can be” box in the DQA.
I find sorting by updated last (order=asc&order_by=updated_at) is the true compromise, you will get old observations that haven’t been interacted with. It seems to hold many observations that were overlooked.
But then again, i’m always preaching about my preference for sorting this way
And I prefer to keep the obs together in sequence.
Seen that, duplicate, please delete. The same picture uploaded 3 times, and each with a different set of identifiers battling to a different conclusion !
Multiple obs each showing a different field mark. Gathered in ONE obs the ID would be blindingly obvious.
If the taxon is seasonal, it helps to have – buds – flowers – fruit – larva – pupa – adult – together.
Seen that ! How many of you are ‘using’ that same picture ?
How in the world do you do that? When I open up the box with the filter options, I do not see anything that says, “show oldest first” or “show newest first”. It simply says “sort by date” but then doesn’t give any USEFUL options within the “search by date” window.
Here’s a screenshot of the filter box I get, with the “search by date” option opened up to show the options within it. What thing do you see on this screen that I can click on to get it to show me the oldest submissions first?
NOTE - I am interested in the oldest submissions, which are not necessarily the oldest observations. I want to ID things that were submitted a long time ago that no one ever bothered to ID. If someone just submitted a 10 year old photo last week, I am not really wanting to prioritize that, because the observer has not been waiting forever for an ID.
thanks so much! that is not intuitive AT ALL, because we are not used to seeing that verbiage for such things … any other website I have ever seen or used uses the verbiage “show oldest first” and “show newest first” … totally missed the truncated form of “ascending” and “descending” because that is not at all what my eyes and brain are used to seeing.
It would be helpful if iNaturalist would standardize more things throughout their website, so that the user interface would be more intuitive and more closely mirror what we see everywhere else. I have tried to join and get involved in projects, but I simply have not been able to figure out how to engage with that part of the site because the user interface is not intuitive.
Or nobody who was able to provide any insight saw it because we are all overwhelmed, etc.
Can we please stop making assumptions about why identifiers might not manage to look at observations? As has been pointed out to you the last time you suggested it, observations not getting ID’d has nothing to do with laziness or “not bothering”.
It’s also possible that IDs were provided at the time, but the accounts that provided them have since been deleted, taking their IDs with them (different can of worms, I know).
Personally, I’m certain there are thousands of Needs ID observations of many different ages that I could ID if I saw them, there’s just never enough time (and if they’re at a high level, finding them amid the sea of ones I can’t help with is a matter of chance). I do go through old observations as well as new, but time is a massive limiting factor in the scheme of all iNat observations.
@tom_reichner if you want to go through the oldest observations and there aren’t too many (I can’t recall what the limit is), you can always sort by newest first, which is the default, and go to the back of the queue. That way you don’t miss observations when moving between pages.
I’ve been trying to work on older observations. I go back and forth between current and older observations. When doing older, I narrow to my state (due to my familiarity), check verifiable and needs ID, and check No under reviewed. Then do a range working from oldest first. I started with 01/01/1900-01/01/2000 and worked one year at a time. I am currently working on 1/1/1900-1/1/2010. It seems to help. When I add an ID and the observation is not yet research grade, people tend to jump in and add to the IDs shortly after.
I don’t know of a way in particular, I typically go through my older obs that haven’t seen much and check to see if I have any new knowledge, or if the AI has an idea. Then I fall down the rabbithole of can I verify this ID, if not I leave it. Tagging is great and spreading the news about the sort by age of uploaded or age of obs, not the same thing.
I typically will work on the observations that have been up the longest but it is also nice to get some new ones in there everyonce in a while.
Today I identified all of the ants I could find as incidental guests in observations of NYC plants. Some of them went back to 2015. I hope that maybe the people who posted them will get something out of it?
I had a selfish reason for doing this. I’m trying to determine which native plants attract the most ant diversity for my rouge pollinator garden at the park.
I wish there were more ways to find “ant cameos” … could the AI image thing search for them for me? How about that?
There has been a flush of Ant IDs recently in New Mexico, including some of the older obs. Y’all are doing the Lords Work. (Shoutout to lucahakase). As someone who has a few old obs that are hanging out until someone finds them just like everyone else. I thank you.
