Noticed this on my homepage for the first time two days ago. Is this a new feature? Is it accurate for anyone else?
I was excited to try it out, but the observations it gives me definitely are not “matching my identification skills”. Mine has given me an unidentified plant observation and a hoof print in the dirt. Whereas I almost exclusively ID birds (especially raptors) and ID hundreds of bird observations each week if not more. Just thought it was funny and slightly disappointing and was curious if it was accurate for anyone else haha
If it works on appearance rather than ID, I can see that the Dicots one looks like the sort of thing that could easily have a bird in it. And if you ID bird footprints, maybe it can’t distinguish between a deer and a bird??
I’ve found that I get relatively very few, but the ones that I have got have all been reasonable based on my past IDs, though a couple I still haven’t been confident enough to ID from the photos given.
I don’t see the feature anywhere on my page. Is it experimental still and only available to some?
Also, if you don’t see it, or you feel like you don’t get observations which match your ID skills, you can manually set your filter to show only observations made by new accounts. :)
Thanks for pointing out that filter for new accounts, @eyekosaeder! Although I’ve done a lot of IDs, I only recently noticed that the filter panel for Identify mode is different from the filter panel for Explore mode. Coulda used that before!
I’ve been using this almost daily. Occasionally there will be observations that are way outside my comfort zone (e.g. plants, insects), but for the most part it is taxa that I have spent more time providing IDs.
I did ask on the blog post about getting a ‘better’ set to pick over. Fitered to Africa today, I got 7, which were interesting. Mostly plants, with a beetle and a frog. Tick tick tick.
