I feel for you, it’s happened to me before. I think they forget to assume the best about people. If they know further than family (or whatever you ID’d it to), they should add it, and yours is just supporting it then, so it’s just how iNat works?!
Once I got a catty reply because I moved a lichen to genus, as it needed chemical tests or lab scope work to get to species, and left a note explaining that with my ID. The user (who has a lot of observations) replied, “how do you know I didn’t do that?” I let it slide because…well…no notes, no nothing. Even their reply didn’t say if they did any of those things or what the results were! I’m not a mind reader and if they didn’t put it in the notes section or add it as a comment or take a photo of doing those things, how am I to know? Well it did accomplish one thing - I made note of that user and I don’t ID their stuff now.
Like, I looked up their profile and they’re a big scientist and a damn site curator. I’m actually so annoyed right now I lost all desire to ID stuff. I’d be less annoyed if it was some guy but… come the hell on, marking something as ‘plant’ is a completely legitimate thing to do when you look at a single photo of a field of relatively indistinct plants. Its not the best ID but come on.
Its one thing if someone is going through and intentionally putting wrong things down but in zero way is that going to mess up anyone’s IDs.
I fully empathize with your last note - 100% going to just skip past any obs I see from them in the future, because I don’t want to deal with that. Imagine discouraging someone who just started on the site and was trying to figure out how to participate?
I’ve done a lot of IDing at all levels recently and, frankly, I’m getting discouraged. I foresee a day when observations older than a year or so hardly ever get IDed to Research or Casual because identifiers are just swamped with new observations. I’m not talking about just Unknowns here, nor about cultivated plants/pets/people/rocks.
I’m talking about perfectly good observations that the observer uploaded as Species A, for example, but there are Species B, C, and D in their region that are also possibilities and the observer’s photos don’t rule them out. It takes quite a bit of time to research and write a comment saying, “You need flowers/tendrils/fur color in the armpits/whatever to rule out Species B, C, and D, so I can only ID this to genus,” much less the time to reply to the observer if they want to discuss the matter. That’s just one example of the kind of observation I’m thinking of. Taken all together, such observations are clogging up the Needs ID pile to the point where I worry that observers will despair of ever getting an ID and therefore stop using iNat.
I don’t see many tools to use in this situation. @jeanphilippeb’s projects are extremely useful (thank you!!), but can’t cover every Needs ID observation. We all try to recruit new IDers and teach observers what they need to photograph for identifiable observations and so on, but I feel like we’re losing ground.
I just needed to vent, as I need to every few months. Thanks for reading!
There are a few ‘big scientist site curators’ here I actively avoid for that type of behaviour.
Sadly like everything, some people just get too big for their britches and can only feel special if they pounce on others.
It is really disheartening, because when you see such things on their profiles, it makes one think how did they get there if people are not okay with that type of behaviour. And they’re interacting with new users and new ID’ers…if they are in that pissy a mood, they need to learn to recognise it and not interact with people if they are not in the mood to be kind like the site rules say!
I hope you keep IDing even if you need to take some time off. And…welcome to the club of having bookmarked identify URL’s that funnel people out xD
Today, I drew a rectangle around Albuquerque which excludes most wild areas (except for people who dropped their point in the middle of town with a giant radius …) and reviewed all the NI and RG Cactaceae and Asparagaceae. These are two very common landscaping plants, because we live in the desert. The other day I drew a circle around the Bosque del Apache visitor center for dozens of unmarked cultivated observations in their cactus garden.
I’ve now reviewed 10,000 observations in my state of these two groups and I learned a lot about the users. Aside from ~25 people I trust, observations identified to species are a true mess. Hundreds of student observations were both cultivated and wrong. (A UNM biology class last semester encouraged students to upload 200 photos each. You all know how quickly that adds up.) Thousands of unmarked cultivated observations of cactus and succulents across the state. Identifying Yucca (12 species), Nolina (4), and Opuntia (25+) without flowers is really difficult and most observations should be moved back to genus.
Honestly, it is all discouraging and frustrating. Observers have a responsibility to properly mark garden plants. CV system could have better safeguards for out-of-range taxa and avoid offering any species in difficult genera (genus or subgenus only).
We’re already there? 650,000 Needs ID observations are left over from 2022 CNC
I had very good luck contacting a university in my state where I keep an eye on things, and explaining the problems with this. Sometimes you can find the professor in charge, but for this example, i ended up sending an email to about 7 different department heads as I wasn’t sure exactly what college it was coming out of at that university. However, it worked. An entire semester has gone by, and no more!
I was polite in my email, explaining what iNat is used for, linking the teacher’s guide, and suggesting SEEK may be better for their classroom depending on what they were hoping their students got out of the assignment. I only got one reply from a professor who was not using it, but the mass upload of 30 photos of the same cultivated plant ad nausium stopped.
I skimmed a bit, it is what anyone has said on here really. A lot of people don’t realise the purpose is to connect people with the natural world, not to generate museum-quality data. Those who want everything Perfect will struggle on this site because people are new, learning, and even experts are imperfect.
That said, burn out is real, so if IDing things gets frustrating, take a break, or a long pause even. there’s nothing wrong in feeling frustrated or overwhelmed in trying to help.
I thought ive seen you around some mushrooms! I have special interest in stereum sp so i have a lot to do still xD luckily they hang out pretty year round. Folk here are starting to find morrels which i have never found a single one.
Sorry if my opinion seems callous, but if someone leaves because IDs failed to magically appear, then iNat simply wasn’t a right fit for them. If the observer truly wants to know what they saw, they can do their own investigation/research. Or not–that’s completely fine! Maybe their interest isn’t that deep or they don’t actually need a name to feel connected to nature. Or maybe they’d be happier using a simple photo guide to local wildflowers (just to name an example) or a Facebook group, or some other computer vision app. That’s great. It doesn’t have to be iNat or bust.
LOL yeah ive tagged you in a few stereums, I definitely still need some work on them to confidently get down to species. I know a little bit ago i went through all the pages on Sutorius eximius because there were not a ton of observations but a bunch of really obvious ones that just couldnt get any confirmations.
Like, theres a lot of mushrooms that can be hard to ID down to species off just visuals but man, there are a few species that are both really easy to ID but also super unpopular
If you get bored you can always look out for new S ostera in the US and bump them back to stereum. Feel free to steal any wording Ive used, and the link to article. I dont bother with going through backlogs myself, but it keeps new ones up to speed. If i have extra time after keeping Alabama cleared out of my identify (i look at all alabama, even though many things i can only high level ID it helps keep unknowns and life and such down if anything!) i sort through eastern us stereums. I was making a good dent for a bit, but its been a busy few weeks.
I feel for both sides of that argument. So.
I have made a few URLs where I work thru planty IDs above family. There was a huge backlog, and I can see, nothing moves if I don’t get back to it for a few days. Cape Peninsula is easy as there are now, only ever a few a day.
But for the Western Cape it is more daunting. About 3.5K backlog. I’ll get there. One day.
And since I have lined up URLs to keep me busy for ever. If it’s blurry or landscape … Mark as Reviewed, Next! Problem solved. I will hammer duplicates or multiples with copypasta.
Perhaps you have a local planty backlog you can help to clear?
PS a mushroom lady - maybe you can help my IDs which go from Unknown to Fungi? End of.
PPS if we had better notification management. Power observers, identifiers, scientists trying to keep ‘their’ slice of iNat in order - get swamped with unmanageable notifications. That also makes salty (presuming that means cross?)
That - ID mountain - is why I feel iNat should push harder to encourage people.
Not to just dump their obs, then wander off into the sunset.
You want an ID? Give back.
1K obs? You owe identifiers about 2.5K IDs in return. See for yourself, how much time and effort, blood sweat and tears, are involved.
It can’t be forced, but it should be fervently encouraged.
I dunno - people have a perception that iNat staff, or curators, are paid to ID. And its not automated computer, identifiers are (busy) people like you.
properly mark garden plants @egordon88
That goes back to iNat choosing to conflate Needs ID and Is it Wild? If we could better filter for - garden plant needs ID, then (informed) observers would be more willing to say Not Wild. Need a less skilled identifier to first trawl thru for cultivated - and leave your skills for actual IDs.
I think I’ve IDed about four times as many observations as I’ve uploaded. Somewhere around there, at any rate; I don’t want to go check the numbers right now. Plus organized two ID blitzes that produced around 18,000 IDs collectively. And published a journal post asking people to do more IDs.
And that’s about all I can do, really. And it’s really quite enough. I think I just get caught up in my own “must complete task” mentality. I should choose a different task, like observe 10 new-to-me beetle species this year or finally tackle Scirpus at the species level or resolve to make observations in all 6 New England states plus New York this year. Fun tasks, in other words.
(I’ll do all that right after I make another 10,000 IDs, because by then it might, possibly, be spring around here.)
Heh. I just spent about two months giving at least a high-level ID to almost all the Unknowns from the 2022 CNC. There were 24,000 such observations when I started, but I certainly didn’t do all of those IDs myself. It felt good to complete that task, but it was a slog, I must admit. I think the global CNC organizers (who are incredibly organized!) need to ensure that the local organizers emphasize marking pets and garden plants as not wild, as well as stressing the importance of identifying. It can’t just be up to iNat staff and users to deal with all of that mess.
I did skim the Bugguide thread. I can certainly see how it would be very frustrating for regular Bugguide users to come to iNat and see many more mis-identifications than they’re used to on Bugguide. There are pros and cons to both sites, as we all know, and unless we can come up with a couple hundred thousand dollars to allow iNat to develop better on-boarding or whatever, I think the most we can do is keep pushing back the tide of incorrect, missing, and imcomplete IDs.
Also, may I just say, @egordon88, you do incredible work here on iNat. Thank you!
ETA: I just checked my numbers - I need to do about 21,000 more IDs to reach four times as many IDs as my observations. That’s only about two months worth of IDing…
I can take a look at fungi for your area, but I’m not as familiar with ids in your region and sometimes its just impossible to get stuff past high level ids on fungi. People love to upload a single pic that doesn’t show most of the neccessary points of id ( not that I’m immune to this, I’m working on forcing myself to be better at this)
I id pyrops, saiva, penthicodes, enchophora, zanna, and am capabale of (means I haven’t identified the yet) identifying hariola, flatidae, aphaena, eddara, etc… I also id mushrooms and protozoans.