I think it would be great if we had field guides available for people to access remotely - I don’t know how that would work, but it would get over the monetary barrier.
An ideal ID-a-thon is active identifiers. New identifiers. Willing teams helping … earthworms for a random example. If you will excuse me, I have angiosperms and proteas waiting and and and 
And in between wandering back to see if the bucky balls mystery is getting past, Not a Rodent, Not an Insect, is so too an Insect !
My personal goal for the last days of the year is trying to push Tigrosa observations over the 50k hump by going through Lycosoidea-Lycosinae observations .. So far it seems I will not succeed this year anymore.. only 250 missing now, but there are so many other genera in the mix as well and I am still not as active as I had been in other times of the year. But it is still fun to see so many observations going to genus or even species and RG after years and years of waiting. Just recently I had several waiting for 10 years and longer that are now RG.. the best
There are so many possible areas to focus my attention. Location 131031 is one I am going to push at the moment, in spite of all of the other possible priorities. Maybe the iNat community can help get the data sorted in light of any geopolitical risks to the GPS data.
The iNat community in that location is one of the warmest and most generous around.
No response necessary. Happy 2026!
And it‘s even Friday 
As I am getting closer to my goal of reaching 10 000 IDs for the ID-A-Thon, here’s what I learned about myself as an identifier:
I don’t think that I currently have the time to learn the ID keys/look-alikes for certain species/families (fungi, plants…) so I can be usefull in helping to reach certain species RG. I feel confident ID’ing 2-3 plant species and 1 fungi species in Germany (as long it is not a hard case and it is close to normal type) and a few orchid species in Cyprus, but after my cleaning spree during ID-A-Thon in those, there is not much left in those categories where I feel confident to confirm.
What seems to be more my niche at the moment (until I have more free time, so perhaps in retirement 
) seem to be sorting unknowns (and perhaps later the dreadful plantae and dicots) into broad categories - sometimes only dicot, but with the help of the CV to refresh my taxonomy memory sometimes even finer.
One really nice feature of the ID-A-Thon was the fast ping-ponging back of IDs. I would move a unknown, e.g. in Acer and somebody else would move it to species only a few hours. That probably won’t be feasible to keep up all the time, but it was a really rewarding community experience, actively feeling so many other people around the world pushing towards the same goals.
If I had a wish list for doing more IDing, it would be a better tool for IDing in the App. After a full work day in front of a PC, my brain and eyes really can’t handle more time in front of a PC screen at home. But I’m spending ~ 3 h each day in a train/bus going from/to work where I could do IDs. During the last weeks I tried IDing in the app (using Explore, which stops working after a few observations and I have to close and restart the app) or using the web site on my tablet (where the touch screen wants to select everything but the ID I have chosen), but that is really a pain.
Did you all find out something about yourselves as identifiers during this ID-A-Thon? Or was it more business as usual for you?
I added Western Cape angiosperms to my bookmarked URLs. Have whittled them from 73 to 58 pages. Going to take … a day or so for each page (with the others I ID) And another 4 pages of WC arthropods but that residue is mostly not going anywhere in a hurry.
I learned that I already have found my IDers niche and am happy with it.. I tried straying off of my business as usual for a bit, but quickly went back to my pile… not that I really need any new suggestions anyways, my pile will kep me busy for as long as I feel like it I guess…
I cleaned off all of my personal needs ID Tigrosa observations in Canada today. I might want to look at the ones I already reviewed years ago, to update those not at species yet.
Besides working on my usual repertoire of taxa as the observations arrived, there were a couple things that stood out, this week.
First, another active identifier must have deleted their account, resulting in a batch of about 30 observations of one taxa I follow showing up as “Needs ID”, when their remaining IDs were several months old. I was perfectly happy to ID these, but it would be nice if some comment remained with these observations, to the effect of “Deleted ID from Deleted Account”, so that I could rule out the other possibility, that I was not finding these observations because of a bug in the software, when I filter for them several times a day.
I also spent time checking some of the Phylogenetic Projects for ‘unknown’ observations for familiar taxa. In one of those, an observation I came across sent me down another rabbit hole. A beetle from Honduras with a striking pattern of white (or maybe silver) dots on a black elytra. The initial ID called it a Leaf Beetle (Family Chrysomelidae). I thought that I could surely find a match among one of the species in this family, but scanning through all of the thumbnail icon photos for this family (and for Coccinellidae) for all of Central America failed to turn up anything. I’m sure there’s just something I don’t know, like a species having a different color morph that’s not reflected in the icon photo, but there’s still the tantalizing thought that this could be a species not reported on iNat before. For now, I’ve just followed the observation and saved a bookmark, in case I have some further inspiration.
As for the last rabbit hole I went down in November, that observation came from a casual observer who hasn’t been active since I made my ID. I tagged the top IDer for the taxon (who indicates an appropriate interest in the group and who’s a curator) but he also hasn’t been active, except for one day last month. And I’m guessing he never saw the notification for my tag. Patience. I need to show more patience!
You need to find another taxon specialist to @mention …
I definitely encountered more IDs that had just been made in the previous hour - or even just minutes - before I got to them, and I liked thinking that right now User X is patrolling the same grounds that I am!
The mysterious beetle is RG!
Calligrapha vigintimaculata, the third observation of this species on iNaturalist and the first of these from Honduras. And definitely the rarest observation I’ve been involved with, either as an observer or an identifier.
Thanks to @jeanphilippeb and his Phylogenetic Projects, without which this observation might have lingered in the unidentified pile, indefinitely.
Yeah!!! That’s a pretty beetle too.
Only two days left to go!
And perhaps I have found my little ID niche 
- confirming Aegopodium podagraria in central Europe. So satisfying to help observations 6 years and older to reach RG.
Funnily enough, I can only recognize the leaves of the plant, not the flowers . But you remember that shape after you removed hundreds of them in your garden each year…
At least that will help me reach my 10000 ID goal, it got really close the last days.
Ugh, I’ve been battling that for two decades in my garden. I consider it a minor success that they only gain a few inches a year.
I agree it’s hard to ID the flowers, they look like a whole lot of other Carrot family species, especially in observations with bad photos and no leaves.
When you get tired of IDing them in Europe, feel free to cross the pond and ID in N.A. … We’ve saved you lots.
Hmmm. This plant occurs in my area, but I don’t have any observations of it. I must have been dismissing it as one of those “indistinguishable green plants”.
I’ll have to look for it, this year!
Yeah the main issue with that would be that I have no knowledge if there are lookalikes over the pond. In central europe, I feel confident that there aren’t any. Same with fly agarics - I know there is only one species here in Europe, but look alikes in North America. So without that geographic barrier, I’ll leave it to the local experts.
Have a look in your yard, if you have one . In some corner where you are not regularly weeding, there will be a kingdom of them and they will have taken over. Some people even like to eat them as salad…
I know how to ID them if I see the leaves and get the urge deep down in my brain to rip them out 
-probably childhood training from my mother- we were helping weed all the time.
I agree - that’s why I never stray outside my own geographic region, and even within it I often check for look-alikes that I didn’t know about or have forgotten.
There are some experts that have such global knowledge that they can ID even tricky taxa (including Apiaceae) just about anywhere in the world. I am grateful to them.
That’ll never be me…
Way late on this, but I did get a help page up that lists keyboard shortcuts for the Identify page: https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/151000225530