I cannot find a strategy for this. I found some of the ones that I knew I made by remembering the taxa. If anyone comes up with a good workflow, I hope you’ll share it.
This could just as easily go into the ID-a-thon thread, but I’d like to reserve that for tips and such.
I just got rid of some Colorado ‘needs ID’, but I did that by knocking a bunch of stuff to Casual, because the observer apparently can’t figure out the difference between wild and deliberately planted. Those aren’t as annoying as the number of observations pegged to a single location (a county Forestry office).
More worrisome is the observer’s habit of taking photos of other people’s call phone photos, computer screens, photos in books, and posting all of those as their observations—all rights reserved, no less. They’ve been reminded several times that this is not allowed, but they don’t appear to respond to notifications (probably because they’re using the app).
This person is not a prolific poster, and sending stuff to Casual is probably the best way to deal with it, but I’m really torn about whether or not I should send a notice to the staff. Any advice / criticism / commiseration on the matter will be welcomed, and gratefully.
This person should be sent a direct message and suspended if they continue to post copyrighted images --those without the photographer’s permission and of organisms they never saw–after being warned. You can either raise the issue with curators on one of the copyrighted media flags, by flagging an observation itself (noting what the issue is), or by sending a message to staff.
Day 1 of the ID-a-thon and the European unknowns of the CNC 2025. Seems like a czech school class is responsible for most of them and nobody told them that it would be great to give a initial ID. Also photos from far away with many different plants - I remember again why unknowns take good nerves and patience…
Finished reviewing the Needs ID orchids of Cyprus in one session. Some I could even move forward, only the difficult cases still open. Maybe some day I’ll be brave enough to touch the Epipactis and Seraphias observations…
So, what have you been up to this first ID-a-ton week?
I started the week with the aim to do some more coarse needs ID observations at arachnida.. as a nod to the theme of IDing unknowns this week, but still IDing in my lane.. but well, arachnida bored me fast I have to admit.. so many acari/mites in the mix I know nothing about.
So I thought I go a bit less coarse and went into order aranae, then into superfamily lycosoidea.. the latter is a bit frustrating to see. So many observations are now stuck at this level because of a recent taxon change that pulled all those observations back from familiy level that had been correct actually and sometimes confirmed by several IDers before and now you just go and mob the floor behind this change and type in that correct family again.. so much IDer time wasted.
Since 2 days I am back at my favourite task in 2025 - Tigrosa. I think I will keep at them at least for the rest of the year to meet some totally made up Tigrosa goals (cleaning of maps, pushing species to a certain number, ratio of needs ID to RG, personal Tigrosa ID numbers and so on.. I am such a simple wired brain) that make me happy 
Overall I IDed a lot less this week as I felt a bit under the weather…
I made it through the pterygota (reviewed and not) in New Mexico today. I typically stick with plants but I wanted something different. I actually wasn’t able to put in too many IDs but I was able to do a little.
Haven’t done a whole lot since I’ve been pretty busy. Here’s what I worked on:
Unknowns
Kingdom disagreements
Bird song
Birds (photos) with missing observation date
I wonder what next Monday’s lesson 2 will be, now the Unknowns are ‘done’.
I started with European unknowns, made a detour into reviewing orchids of Cyprus, back again into unknown and currently I am trying to see if I can move some Glechoma hederacea in Germany (at least those with flowers) into RG. After that, I’ll try Ficaria verna.
After the unknowns, I might start to try moving observations IDed at Plants/Dicots … to a lower level (but not those stuck there because of disagreements). Does anybody know a good Identify filter for this?
In the filters in identify, you can select lowest and highest rank – so to see observations with an ID of dicots, enter magnoliopsida as the taxon and “class” as the lowest rank.
There is a filter for observations with disagreements, but none for those without. But to see observations without disagreements, I think it should work to add &disagreements=false to the end of the url.
I’m looking for a note about someone interested in moving lichen IDs from kingdom, etc.
Unknown / Cladoniaceae project is chock full of under-IDd observations, with 1300 waiting for narrower ID. IDing these to family would really move things along, if it’s one with which you’re familiar.
You wanted a better challenge from the ID-a-thon ?
Today you have half a million angiosperms (where will that be on 15 January ?) - I will tackle the Western Cape.
Well, at least we won’t run out of observations to work on in this week of the ID-a-thon!
More seriously, it’s obvious this ID-a-thon is focused on bringing new or inexperienced identifiers along. That’s wonderful, but I wonder what an ID-a-thon would look like for high-volume identifiers, say, those who have made more than 10,000 IDs for others. Would we just target reducing the numbers of Needs ID observations? Or target all the Needs ID observations more than 6 years old? Or coordinate on boosting some species into being included in the CV? Or enlist experts in neglected groups to teach us how to sort, for example, liverworts into genera and when to declare liverwort observations into As Good As It Can Be at the family level and above?
What would an ideal ID-A-thon look like for you, DianaStuder - and all the rest of you, as well?
It just looks like every other day of the year 
All of the above?
Or none of the above. As danly said, we’re already putting in the effort, every day of the year. Maybe putting more time into this than we ought to. If we were motivated to dedicate more time for an organized event, picking any one of those goals you mentioned wouldn’t mesh with each of our individual interests and skills. So we just have to push on, in all these multiple directions, as best as we can do.
Personally, I’m still trying to add taxa to my identification repertoire, one taxon at a time. I wrote a post yesterday that was feedback on the ID Summaries Demo, but it did include a question that I’d love an answer to, if someone can provide some mentoring: how can I distinguish observations of Hippodamia convergens from similar species in that genus? Even an answer of “no, that’s not possible from a photo” would be helpful.
For the last couple days of this year, I have two particular goals related to my year in review page. I’ve almost made as many identifications this year as I have in my first five years on iNaturalist. I’m not sure if I can match that figure, particularly because of the different ways IDs are counted, but I’m also just short of having helped 25,000 people with my IDs, and that target is easily within reach.
@danly and @larry216 you are both so right! I have definitely been putting more time into this than I ought to.
As far as Hippodamia goes, I know nothing, alas. But that reminds me of another question I have: do we (the entire iNat community) want iNat to replace paper or digital field guides or manuals with keys? I don’t mean to dicuss the use of AI to collate comments on iNat (there’s certainly enough discussion elsewhere), but I keep thinking iNatters should just buy and read and use field guides. Now, first, that statement reflects my immense privilege in living somewhere with lots of field guides (and I have the money to buy them), but it may also reflect my experience of growing up decades ago with nothing but field guides to learn from. Should the iNat community be pointing new observers and identifiers to field guides and manuals elsewhere, or even helping to produce such tools for taxa and regions where nothing’s available?
“It looks like every other day” is pretty much what I said in the ID-a-thon thread and got told my attitude was too discouraging.
I think for me an ID-a-thon would look like a group of IDers interested in a particular taxon getting together to coordinate their efforts in working on a particular set of observations (and maybe improve their skills along the way). For example, something like @matthewvosper 's approach in the UK syrphid project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/uk-hoverflies-syrphidae/journal/120854-12-tribes-of-christmas
We have not intentionally coordinated, but I and a couple other of the regional bee identifiers seem to all have decided to use the quite period during the holidays and the off-season to look at some of the observations that have been stuck at “bees” for months or years due to disagreements. It’s been fun to see observations that are 5 or 6 years old finally get sorted out.
That’s always my favorite sort of Identifying: looking for disagreements (for plants) in my region, starting with the oldest. The fun ones are the really old ones with a long string of incorrect IDs, requiring an even longer string of correct ones, along with some lively discussions and explanations, to get them over the finish line.
I’m personally not doing anything differently for ID-a-thon, just plodding along in my usual way in my spare moments/hours…
That’s happiness, even when it’s not “Identifriday”!