Considering its snowing here in Ohio and I’m not likely to find many interesting shrooms even if I did go hiking…
Time to go pick away at the unknown pile
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we finally got rain yesterday and it drizzled into today, so I saw a lot of fresh mushrooms poping out today
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I might go out in a couple days and see if any of the cold weather shrooms pop up, it rained all day yesterday so I might get lucky and find some blewits or enoki. Or some of the winter jellies.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll just be excited every time I come across a good looking shroom pic in the unknown pile - its always nice to find something in the sea of unidentifiable plant leaves
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I’m going through global Hymenoptera, starting at Order level. Please respond to this or message me with your country nominations. It’s less daunting to do smaller regions along the way.
So far, I’ve looked at New Zealand, Hong Kong, Ukraine, Albania, Greece, all of Africa, and I started Russia. After Order, I’ll drop to suborder Apocrita and infraorder Aculeata. About 65k observations to go - maybe I’ll be done by Earth Day.
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I’ve had some notifications from you already :)
1,700 unreviewed Hymenoptera at order level in California alone, roughly equivalent to all of Australia. Y’all stay busy 
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Reading again about the Peters projection and how VAST Africa is - it makes me sad that one of us can tackle all of Africa. It is one of my designated daily iNat tasks. I will retrieve Hymenoptera for you from my 1K waiting after gsb22.
But yesterday someone from Ghana was delighted to find butterflies in Twi searchable on iNat. The more common names we can add across languages the better!
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Great endeavour! I think my Hymenoptera from Germany, Colombia and Ecuador are actually in pretty good shape, considering that it is not the easiest group and compared to other groups in my observations … but most are in Family or Genus region, which is probably in many cases as far as it can go… but you are more then welcom to take a look :-)
Love the idea, love the hashtag, will defenitely start my identifications every friday!
Greetings from Ecuador!
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Germany, Colombia, and Ecuador are next 3 on my list, whether you intended it or not
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I was curious at which level IDs can make the biggest dent and checked what makes up the “Needs ID” pool in my usual target area (Southern Appalachians). Some interesting observations:
- “Unknowns” are actually just a very small fraction of the total Needs ID observations (less than 1%).
- Plantae doesn’t represent a big group either (less than 2%). Looking at observations at kingdom level in this area, they are an almost even split between fungi (slightly more) and plants, with everything else negligible. Phylum level observations are almost all plants, too, but again less than 1% of the total pool.
- So where is the biggest need for IDs? At species level! The vast majority of the Needs ID pool is observations with a species ID suggestion awaiting confirmation to RG. Most of these (56%) are plants, followed by 19% insects and 15% fungi.
- The next largest chunk of the pool (almost a third) is observations at genus level awaiting the right kind of expert looking at them to narrow them to species, or possibly mark them as “can’t be improved” where applicable. Again, most are plants (51%), followed by insects (24%) and fungi (14%).
- Observations at family, order, and class levels are there and more abundant than unknowns or the higher levels, but even together don’t come close to the numbers for the genus and species pools. Among these coarser IDs, the ones that dominate at family and order are insects (41-45%), followed by plants, fungi, and arachnids. The ones at class level are almost all plants.
This is of course location specific and may have been influenced by my own ID’ing activities over the past years focusing on unknowns and Plantae in this area. The size of these subgroups in the Needs ID pools in your area may vary.
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I haven’t done the work to check those numbers for New England, where I live, but your numbers seem about right for here, too. Plants need our help, everyone!
Now, I think plants linger in the Needs ID pile more than animals in part because many observers don’t know what to photograph to get a plant observation down to genus or species. I see MANY observations that are just tree bark. I know some trees can be IDed just from their bark, given a decent photo, but for many trees, most IDers will want to see leaves as well, if not buds, seeds, degree of hairiness or not on the leaf undersides, etc., etc. So part of the IDer’s task may be to educate the observers, but short of individual messages on each observation, there’s no efficient way to do that on iNat.
For what it’s worth, I organized a New England Plant ID-a-thon last February (and I’ll do it again this coming February). It was remarkably successful, in part because the Massachusetts state botanist (Bob Wernerehl, wernerehl on iNat) invited the members of the New England Botanical Club to join in the fun - and boy, did they! But now there are over 360,000 plant observations in New England that are Needs ID at the species level. I chip away at them now and them, but I’m not an expert botanist, so I don’t tackle the graminoids, for example.
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Working on finally finishing this set of observtions, would like someone else from general insect iders to come through those, there’re many that I ided by they still were left at Pterygota. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=Insecta&place_id=7161&lrank=subclass
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My guess is that this is a “steady state concentration” and that Unknown id’ers are keeping it tamped down over time. But I have no feel for how fast the % would change if everybody just stopped.
I do notice as I annotate Lepidoptera that many obs (probably over 1%) at that level are labeled as such by “the regulars”, not by the original observers. But I don’t know how to quantitate that either.
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I’d say maybe 10-15% at max (which is a lot), there’re a lots of unknowns uploaded, but also much more ided observations. Also, many unknowns go straight to casual obs with missing data or then marked captive (and not ided).
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That´s interesting
for Colombia it looks like this
Total needs ID: 535.320
from that unknowns: 9.810
kingdom level plant: 20.070 – family level: 17.070 – genus level: 75.480 – species level plant: 59.160
kingdom level fungi 7.000 – family level: 2.220 – genus level: 13.410 – species level: 4.200
kingdom level animalia 570 – family level: 46.590 – genus level: 92.670 – species level: 49.860
plantae (total) 207.750
animalia (total) 277.920
fungi (total) 37.590
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And lots of lovely new (plant for me) species in the latest CV update. Including one orchid from our weekly Fynbos Rambles. And lots of still new to me species (mostly out of my immediate range)
So satisfying to see that helpful database growing as we watch.
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Cool, saw you were even able to improve some. Thank you! :-)
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AHHHH under 1000 pages left as I work my way through Alabama’s non-RG
(I have looked through over 9000 pages thus far!)
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Wow, impressive!
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