Identifier Mentoring

General
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I’ve been reading a lot of topics that have been coming up lately, and I am sure it is not even close to a new cry:

We need more identifiers! But how to find them/motivate them!

Often also being paired with

I would like to learn to identify more, but I am too worried I am not going to be helpful!

And often that part of the conversation seems to kind of… fizzle out, doesn’t it? Or goes around in circles. I understand why- it’s rather a big thing isn’t it, to try to solve? It’s likely in fact entirely unsolvable ultimately. There will always be more ID’s flowing in than IDers to handle them. That’s okay, in fact, it makes IDing super interesting (for me) and exciting because what am I going to see today here that I didn’t see yesterday???

But back to the actual topic-

I’d like to start up a list/discussion here about what people ID and what they would like to learn how to ID. Specifically, what you can ID well and would be willing to talk to others to help them also learn how to ID your area (narrow or broad) and what areas you would be interested in learning from another user about in the same regard.

I know a lot of this happens very informally on the site itself. Some folks on the site have already written these amazing articles on how to differentiate this species from that (these are my favorite, when I find them/am linked to them but I am sure there are so many I’m not even aware of). This is, likewise, informal and maybe it won’t go anywhere, but I’d like to see who of us who like to ID and have particular pet areas might be willing to share that knowledge with another person/persons in a more mentorship role?

It’s easy to say ‘well, someone could go do the research’ and yes, that’s true and people should! So if that’s your answer to this then maybe this isn’t the right fit for you and that’s okay! Sometimes finding the right resource is a challenge from the beginning and maybe this will help facilitate that for some people. Maybe I’ll be the only person to throw out there my answers to this and this will fizzle completely. But I suspect there are at least a couple people in each camp that might be interested. Have a guide you have previously written but don’t want to worry about more? Pop that link up, we want to see it even if you don’t want to active mentor in a different way.

Will this get any kind of ball rolling? Who knows. Has someone tried this already? I tried to search the forum and didn’t really find anything but let me know if this is a repeat I missed and I should just quietly go and participate in an existing program someone has in place.

I am not an expert! And there is so much I still am learning, every day. But I get the opportunity to work with plants and wildlife daily, specifically the following:

I am good with:
Common to uncommon native plants (mostly dicots with some monocots and confiers) of the US North East and Mid Atlantic Region, with a focus on coastal saltmarsh and brackish tidal areas.
Invasive species of the same region
Horticultural species and landscaping plants

Something I’d like to learn better:
Dragonflies and damsel flies of the US NE/MA regions! (I’d love to learn more but I’m picking one thing to start with)

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A couple years ago, we had an organized mentorship program where the more experienced user checked the mentee’s IDs. Was that @arboretum_amy ?

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I participated. It was dreamed up/set up by @astra_the_dragon.

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There are about 3 dozen species of Ludwigia (primrose-willows) in the United States (probably covers Canada too). I know most of them pretty well and they are a fun challenge to ID because you usually have to consider a bunch of characters. There’s a huge backlog of “needs ID” for them. I’d be happy to mentor someone who’s interested in them.

I’d be very interested in working with someone who could help me learn to ID Cyperus (flatsedges) of the US from field photos.

I imagine those requests are way more specialized than what you have in mind and unlikely to hit a target, but I can’t think of more generalized groups I’d be comfortable with. I like narrowness.

Anyway it’s a fun idea to think about.

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I used to know odonates (dragonflies and damselflies) somewhat well, a decade ago, especially the exuviae of riverine Anisoptera. What would you like to know, @hcoste?

And I’m like you in that I know many of the common plants of northeastern North America, but there are many plants in the region I “ought” to know, but simply have been too lazy to look up and remember how to tell apart, say, the various Potentillas. Or even the Trifoliums and their look-alikes. I could probably make a list of 20 or more pairs/trios of species I can never remember how to tell apart and learn them. (Viburnums. White water-lilies. The leaves of yarrow vs. Queen Anne’s Lace. Hypericum. Scirpus - they can’t be that hard, right?) On the other hand, I would happily help someone who wanted to learn some common species.

Likewise, I know random bits of information about other groups - adult Monarchs vs. Viceroys, and larval Monarchs, and the fact it’s really quite difficult to tell larval Viceroys from other common species in the same genus. Some of the local mammals, but don’t ask me about scat or tracks or bones (most of the time). Some moths, but fewer species than I should know by this point; I depend too much on iNat’s AI, followed up by a check into the field guide. I’m learning mosses and liverworts, but I can tell you they are hard; ask me again in two or three years.

So, how do we go about conveying information to each other? This topic will get pretty complicated very soon if we throw all the information here, but what if we (meaning those who are willing to teach) write journal posts and link them here, maybe in a wiki sorted by region?

And I’m curious: has iNat or anyone ever conducted a confidential survey of observers with the aim of finding out why people don’t make IDs, or don’t make many IDs? I can imagine many reasonable answers: “I don’t have that much free time and I’d rather spend it outside making observations than spend any more time inside in front of a computer making IDs.” “When I go through all the Needs ID observations from my region, there are only one or two a page I can help with, so it feels like I’m not contributing much.” “Frankly, I’m scared of being wrong!” And so forth. But those are just my imaginary answers; I’d like to know the real ones.

Also, I make lots of IDs already and yet I never run out of “easy” species to ID. If I learn how to ID more species, I’ll have to put a time limit on myself each day, or run the very real risk of repetitive motion injury. Well, really, I’m already at that point, alas!

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I would be happy to try to teach anyone to learn to recognize the basic families of seashells on any of the coasts of North America.

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I think big reason why this happens on iNat itself is because such learning and mentoring is typically very taxon- and region-specific and also by nature pretty hands-on, so it makes more sense to have discussions in the context of projects or individual interactions than in the forum, which is very general in scope and where too much discussion of specific observations/projects/users is generally discouraged.

Also only a very small percentage of active iNat users are also active forum users.

What I would like to see on iNat is better support for IDer networking. Journal posts are difficult to find unless they are associated with a project. Projects are somewhat more findable, but there are so many and the search options are so rudimentary that searching can be a frustrating experience.

There are also no good ways for users to have discussions on iNat itself, apart from the comment threads for journal posts, which have fairly limited functionality compared to forum or chat posts. I think some of the users who do regular mentoring or coordination of IDing activities use external sites (such as Discord or Zoom) for meetings and discussions.

Some kind of editable list of mentoring projects/resources seems like it would be useful. I think maybe it would make more sense to sort by broad taxa first and then by region.

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Agree. There is quite a bit of mentoring going on within the site, but it’s largely because people who want to learn more try to associate with those who are able to help them.

I did and still do that, and there are several who do that with me. If you want to learn more about ID, a good option to try is ask the people who ID a lot of your stuff, and start working on your area.

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Ask @dryopteris2 for Cyperus ID mentoring.

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I went through a bit of ID mentoring on IDing eastern North American cicadas.

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ive tried to dip my toe into Ludwigia a couple times, but found them a bit overpowering. i love them, i’d like to learn how to ID them!

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I “helped” with that earlier mentoring effort and, frankly, did it badly. I’d be willing to help again or maybe not. The selection of species I can ID is broad but eccentric, mostly plants of the PNW of N America but excluding a lot of them and including at lot of widespread weeds, some eastern N American plants, lots of North American and European birds, and an assortment of others. A frustration is that two groups I’m supposed to know well (grasses and sedges) are often posted without good, clear photos of details needed for identification. I can’t help anybody ID those.

What I could do: (1) Check somebody’s ID’s (within my area/taxa) and offer confirmations and/or explanations where I can. (2) Have a zoom meeting with a beginner to share how to start the process, if and only if that person is using the website, not an app. (3) Engage in discussion of individual observations that I know enough about to be helpful with (or think I do).

What I could do within the next couple weeks (before August 10): Absolutely nothing! (In odd moments I’m using iNaturalist to avoid what I need to be working on, but I really do need to get those things done.)

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I’m wondering if it would be helpful for the iNat blog to feature some easily identified organisms on a regular basis. The post could include characteristics to look for when identifying the organism and perhaps people to contact if you have questions. It would probably be most useful if it was something found broadly around the world, but it could also get people into the habit of identifying some of the most common observations. I remember seeing something somewhere about Asian ladybeetles like this.

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I like what @arboretum_amy did in her journal post That’s Not My Name: Episode 1, Gambelia, where she has helpful information to distinguish a subset of often-confused taxa and requested help from a few active identifiers to help look through them.

Also there’s @nathantaylor’s Weedy Species of Sandmats and things like @edanko and @zdanko’s fly guide, and much more that I’m not aware of, so resources for how to identify are key.

I think a good way to on-board people to identifying is:

  1. Is the person already pretty interested in IDing their own observations, seem like a regular user in the area or life-type?
  2. Can you provide a helpful guide for distinguishing between whatever you want them to help you identify?
  3. Tag them in the journal, guide, etc. with a link to the identify page with filtering for whatever’s relevant asking for specific help.
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I also think identifiers would be more likely to help with some positive feedback. I know when I started there was nothing or nobody to tell me I was doing a good job or even doing it correctly. It was intimidating.

I think Nattalie’s idea of the iNat blog featuring a weekly or monthly ID session with common species is a wonderful idea.

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It would be great to have a little more guidance for people who are not experts in anything but who try to go through some of the Unknowns. I like doing that a lot – as others add more-specific IDs it helps me learn – but often the only ID that I can confidently put is something like “Lepidoptera” or “Beetles.” Or literally “Plants.” Is that ultra-coarse-grain ID-ing helpful, or should one hold off? A few other things I’ve wondered about:

–I’m trying to understand how to distinguish various basic families of moths, plants, fungi, etc., but haven’t found a guide for that and perhaps it’s the kind of thing that only comes with experience? But any recommendations welcomed.

–With Unknowns, sometimes I take the AI’s main suggestion and then go a few steps up in taxonomy (e.g. from Wavy-Lined Emerald to Geometridae); is that level of AI-assisted ID generally reasonable?

–I’ve also gone back and forth on whether to leave a comment encouraging people to add an initial ID themselves, in the future. Right now, if the observer doesn’t have many observations, I do try to add a comment noting that even a really general ID might help the observation get seen by people who can narrow it down further – but now I’m not sure how often those notes are seen, if they sound micromanaging, or even if it’s accurate to say a really general ID would help with the narrowing.

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Discussions about how to ID unknowns come up fairly regularly in the forums actually (if you do a search for “unknown” you will discover a bewildering number of threads), and usually there ends up being some interesting and useful info in one comment or another, which of course inevitably eventually gets lost in the pile of new threads.
This one may be a good starting point: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/good-global-criteria-when-identifying-unknowns/47167/7

So again, it seems like it is a findability issue for information that is scattered unsystematically in many places, rather than there not being any information.

There are some resources collected in this observing wildlife wiki, though I’m not sure how much it gets looked at/updated.

I wonder if it would make sense to use one or more of the “unknown” projects (e.g., @bobmcd’s “state of matter life” project or @jeanphilippeb’s yellow projects) as a place to collect resources and tips for IDing unknowns and narrowing broad IDs. Generally project creators and anyone they have named as an administrator can create journal posts, so it would require some coordination between project creators and anyone who is interested in contributing content.

(The reason I keep pushing the idea of journal posts here is because it seems like a better way than forum posts to ensure that relevant information remains accessible for those who want to refer to it – if you join a project any associated journal posts are essentially bookmarked for you and you can get updates if new journal entries are posted.)

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I’ve been dipping my toe into Ludwigia as well. I’ve got plenty of work cut out for me with the east Texas and Louisiana species, that I haven’t even bothered trying to learn to ID the other ones.

I think that coarse-grain sorting is helpful for plants and animals. Fungi is really hard to sort into coarse groups because things can look very similar and yet be totally unrelated. One of my plant books has a good guide to sorting wildflowers into families. It’s mostly based around the shape/structure of flowers. Something that I don’t think that a lot of people take into consideration when IDing wildflowers is to look at the reproductive structures.

PPS Anyone want to learn to tell the difference between an Eastern Cottontail and a Swamp Rabbit? Or at least go through and mark observations as scat or tracks?

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My old (1970) Field Guide to the Insects by Borror & White ID’s things to order or family. It’s in the Peterson FG series so there must be a zillion used copes out there. Those coarse ID’s are useful. A good place to start. (And if you’re wrong and someone comes along to correct you, well, your ID did it’s job! I say as someone who isn’t intimidated about labeled anything caterpiller-like as Lepidoptera, though I’ve now learned sawflies exist.)

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I never did write episode two. What should it be about?

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