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
“a” for agree is missing. Maybe explain that certain shortcuts only work for certain tabs? I used to accidentally do the “a” for alive/dead while on the wrong tab and end up agreeing with the community ID.
Alive is a + a
If there are various IDs,I have learnt to be careful about WHAT a for agree actually agrees with. I open in a new tab to choose which to agree with. Otherwise … delete the wrong one … rinse and repeat … but carefully this time. (I don’t want to agree with CID. For what, for why ?)
That’s true, pretty much never
That’s true. Pretty much never is agreeing with CID helpful
thanks, sorry. fixed!
I do a lot of IDs where the observer has chosen the species level CV and it is correct. It is faster to go through them using “a” to agree then arrow to go to the next. I don’t click agree from the thumbnails in case the photos don’t all show the same species (I see this a lot when IDing Taxodiomyia). If there are more than one ID before I get there, I don’t use the “a” shortcut.
PS I said “a” for alive/dead instead of “a + a” for alive and “a + d” for dead for shorthand assuming people would know what I’m talking about
Since the topic of the keyboard shortcuts came up, has anyone figured out a way to make life stage annotations for insects less uncomfortable? Right now I use my my right hand for both the “L” and arrow button (and my left hand for the “A”/adult, which is the majority of the annotations). It’s a heck of a stretch to use my forefinger for “L” and my pinky for the arrow, and my hand gets sore fast. I can’t tell if I could be doing it a better way, and/or if my particular keyboard layout is making it harder.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/announcing-the-universal-metadata-tool-beta/53182
or some sort of programmable keypad or stream controller deck or something like that.
I use a program called auto hot key, I write a script that inputs those keystrokes when one key is pressed, chose a key that is comfortable and take it from there.
There is a good guide for doing simple things like that provided with the program
Highlights from another week iNatting instead of working on my household chores. 
I’m adding some longhorn beetles to my identification repertoire. One species has over a thousand observations at Needs ID, although I’m trying to go slow, in case I’m making some error that feedback might correct.
Following up on the ID-a-thon, I felt that what we were telling new identifiers, that adding a broad-level ID would help bring observations to the attention of experts, is largely an empty promise. Too many end up in those big piles (e.g. plants, angiosperms, dicots) and remain there for years. So, this week, I’ve been spending some time looking at plants with IDs in the Kingdom-Class range, and sorting randomly to see what I can pull out of the pile with some judicious use of the CV suggestions. Even if I’m only picking one observation out of every random selection of 30 (I’m looking for clear photos including flowers or fruit, usually), there’s a lot that can be refined. I admit I’m being bolder than usual, identifying taxa I’ve never seen before, but I’m keeping a close watch on my notifications and will withdraw an ID that’s gone to far. (That happened once so far this week, with a helpful comment that explained my error.)
I’ll note that there’s another category of observation stuck in these huge piles. Someone identifies an observation as species A, then someone else adds a conflicting ID for species B from a different order. Neither identifier tags anyone else. Now, the CID is bumped up to the common taxon (e.g. Dicot) and there the observation sits for years. Unless they add an ident_taxon_id= URL filter to search for them, experts for species A and species B are left unaware of these observations of potential interest. It takes at least one more ID to push these into the pre-maverick project, from which more help might finally break the deadlock.
There’s one other thing I stumbled across this week. I’ve favored more use the DQA to get observations out of the Needs ID pile, but I’ve been troubled that we can’t search for observations with this DQA field set. Well, @jeanphilippeb apparently found some way to do that, since he created a project for The Community Taxon is as good as it can be three years ago! Some of the entries in that project are intriguing and warrant some further examination. 2,186 observations with an CID rank of Kingdom to Class are currently Needs ID. If any IDs really can be improved, these are surely some of the likeliest ones to check. And then there are 351 observations entered as Unknown! This suggests two possibilities to me: either observers are inadvertently clicking this entry or they have a severe misunderstanding of what that DQA means. They’re probably interpreting it as “I personally don’t have any idea what this is (and don’t even realize that I can enter something broad like ‘plant’) so, yes, Unknown is as good as can it can be.” Ugh. These entries are also something I intend to check. And thanks to reading the DQA votes disappearing thread, I know that adding any better ID will eliminate this faulty DQA vote.
check out https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/search+urls#dqa
e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?fails_dqa_needs_id=true
Oh, thanks! I thought I looked thoroughly through the How to use iNaturalist’s search URLs wiki in the Tutorials, but I see it’s there, too.
I thought that sorting into dicots an monocots was pretty pointless, but I do like when people sort out flowering plants from moss, ferns, conifers, etc. Makes it easier for me to skip over the things that are not flowering plants to leave them for others to ID. The insect divisions might be helpful? I don’t ID insects very much so I’m not sure.
This is why I love the new “disagreements” filter. I can find those more easily and add IDs and tags.
Visited and already found some that should not have been marked “as good as it can be”.
Hmmm. I read the blog post about that filter, but I guess I need to experiment more with this to see what other filters would make this useful. For the example I used earlier, we’d still need to include the ident_taxon_id filter to narrow the search down to a disagreement with a particular species? (Side note: there are nearly 2.5 million Needs ID dicot observations with disagreements. That’s…a lot. 
)