And let’s include New England Cottontail, while we’re at it. Someday, I hope to have the time to ID all the cottontails in New England (that don’t show the skull) to genus and leave a note with copious references to external scientific information. But that may not happen in my lifetime, because there just aren’t enough hours in a day.
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Really? What level of pre-selection of observations are you thinking of here? It is probably possible for a page where you have already selected for them all to be the same easily recognised species. Or if you are scanning a page of 30 miscellaneous, marking most as reviewed and picking out a few to identify. But if I was to look at a page of miscellaneous obs from my area, A) I wouldn’t be able to identify most of them and B) there is no way I could do identifications on average in 6 seconds. Maybe I’m just way below average.
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I started using iNat in 2021 and my interests in it have grown steadily to border obsessive. I have two interests that have become contradictory. On the one hand, I have more than 53,000 observations waiting to be uploaded. Since nobody will iNat them for me after I die, I have been feverishly uploading. I have managed to upload 3,000 observations in 14 days, but that is a crazy exception. More than likely, I am looking at several years to upload everything – and keep in mind that I am adding contemporaneous observations as well (at least several thousand per year, if not considerably more). But before I decided to upload every plant or animal I have ever photographed (I bought my first camera setup as a teenager in 1981), I was spending more time identifying Florida birds than uploading. I went through the entire review queue several times until it was routine that I finished the queue (100-200 records per day) two or three times per day. I would review religiously for one or two hours each day, going through 200-400 records, or as many as were needed to empty the queue for that day. I crossed paths frequently with one extremely displeasurable iNatter, which dampened my enthusiasm for reviewing (we blocked each other but I still saw his name daily since he is an active identifier). Also dampening was the increasing use of cell-phones to take poor images of a bird perched at least 50 feet away, See that blob behind the leaves? My teacher said that’s a Pine Warbler. (I always tell when school starts, since some teachers/professors offer extra credit to those students who iNat). Several months ago, I attained 100,000 bird identifications from Florida, and I ceased identifying. My primary reasoning was that the time spent identifying for others would be much more valuably spent uploading my own images. Birds in Florida still get identified quickly by others, so I don’t feel any guilt in dropping out of reviewing.
Since I iNat EVERYTHING I photograph, I am frustrated that so many records go months or years, before being identified (if they ever are). And I’m just talking about fungi or most moths, I’m talking easy-to-identify species like Bluejack Oak (Quercus incana; only 8 of my 36 records have been RGed). I don’t have an answer to this issue, except to try to draw some people away from BAMONA and toward iNat. And with iNat growing observers at a greater rate than they/we are growing mushroom or bee identifiers, then I am not surprised that the gulf between RG and needs ID continues to widen. As of this minutes, I have uploaded 42,847 records to iNat, with 34,225 of these RGed (79.8) and 8,472 needing ID (19.7%).
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43K obs and how many IDs by you in return?
You … want your obs to be IDed. But so do all the other iNatters.
The arithmetic doesn’t add up.
I don’t think there is an average time for a page of 30. For me it would range all the way from, a quick glance, can’t help, mark as reviewed, next.
To the ones, where I try, with CV, and nearby, and is it A or B, and who can I @mention??
And this evening’s rabbit hole https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/484254-Stephanorrhina only 35 obs to consider and taxon specialists to ask.
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103,000, as I wrote.
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I guess you did not read my post. 43k observations, 103k reviews.
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I tripped over ‘ceased identifying’.
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It’s taken me 12 years to submit 5,000 observations to iNat. Barely over one a day. I can’t imagine trying to submit tens of thousands of records. My wife would probably have divorced me by now. 
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80% Research Grade is something to be very happy with, considering that there are many observations and taxa that cannot or should not be identified to species. I make mostly high-quality observations (e.g., multiple, frame-filling photos, showing different features, in focus) but because most of my observations are of insects and plants outside of well-known parts of the world, I have only 43% Research Grade. It’s always satisfying when old observations get identified to species, but I’ve given up on the idea that anywhere near all of my observations will go to RG a long time ago.
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If you have all of those observations, with good date and locality data, that’s an incredible resource! At the risk of raising DianaStuder’s ire, I think your calculations are exactly right. Others can identify the birds, but only you can upload those observations and save them for posterity. Concentrate on that and return to IDs when you’re caught up (or maybe when you need a change of pace).
For comparison, I started iNatting in 2020 and I’m a bit under 15,000 observations, with less than 54% at RG. And I do try to upload more than one photo per observation, with different views necessary for the ID, etc.
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I can speak to this. When I do Caribbean islands, it takes me approximately one second to determine if it is a broad taxon that I might be able to help with. If no, click the arrow; if yes, it can take a variable length of time – from a couple seconds to do an easy “agree” to a minute or even longer to consult my sources on a trickier one. So, with my settings at 30 observations per page, I can review a page in as few as 30-40 seconds if there is nothing that I can help with, and progressively longer time frames the more observations I can help with. (This is with saving “mark as reviewed” for the end of the page.)
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Agreed! I have 44.5% RG on 17,000 verifiable observations. 80% is practically unheard of unless you only photograph vertebrates and cactus. Excluding 2025, my 11k arthropod entries are 44% RG, so about the same as my overall rate.
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For CNC25 Graz was around 80%. Everybody else around 40%, except the ‘winner’
It is interesting that a lot of people have mentioned the season as the reason for observations outstripping identifications recently. But my experience is in the southern hemisphere, where it is still winter. Over winter, the number of observations in Australia has been accelerating, the pile waiting to be IDed has grown enormously. I have noticed that some of that is people using winter to upload old photos and catch up on their personal backlog, but most of it is new observations. And spring is starting to pop! So it is not going to get better any time soon.
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79.8% RG
Consider yourself lucky. I’m at 40%.
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It would seem that if you focus on invertebrates and/ or plants you can definitely accumulate greater species numbers given their greater diversity. But you will have a lower percentage of records reaching RG. It’s harder to rack up a lot of vertebrate species but they are more likely to be IDed to species and reach RG.
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I can’t say I have noticed any slowdown in ID time. How long has it been going on? Longer then the pushback about the Google grant?
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Ive noticed a slow down, enough i reactived getting a notification for confirming identifications. Even with 50,000+ observations, I usually don’t get more than 5 notifications a day from my observations. Some days it’s even 0.
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By a page of 30 observations in 3 minutes, I mean one of three things.
A page of “Unknowns” adding a class-level ID
A page of local species to the identifier that they are familiar with
A page of a single common species of Needs ID observation i.e. mallards, monarchs, etc.
If you need to key something out or look at a guide that will take much longer. Those observations comprise less than 10% of Inat observations, but will take the longest.
Perhaps, but there is an upside then of you having higher quality identifications(less mavericks) than the average identifier. I hover around the 1-2% mark for my local flora(you could be at 0.5% or even less which is excellent.)
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