Or, they were told that iNat is the place to get their photos IDed and the website is not doing a good job of educating them otherwise.
I read the whole thing. I wish that I were surprised by the tone; I tentatively dipped a toe there, several years back, and got "L0LNOOB"d so badly that it put me off of submitting photos anywhere for a goodly while. I respect the expertise at BugGuide, but for all that one of the members in that thread claimed friendliness for the site, I sure wasn’t shown any of it.
I can’t claim quite that high a ratio of IDs to observations, but I’m managing at least 2 to 1. I stand in awe of people who have racked up thousands of IDs for others.
7 Likes
Thanks for the refinements, updated!
This identifier is very grateful that subspecies or variety now count towards an ID at species. That is welcome progress!
If we could better manage our notifications …
4 Likes
Some of those comments sound pretty elistist to me (especially some of the more recent ones) and they come from a very different angle. It reminded me of intense dicussions I had with a collegue a while back that did not get why he should at all try to connect the public to his research… basically with a sentment deeming the public anyways to dumb to understand and get the point of it.
I come from a very different place (back then I even thought I might end up in science communication…) and thing this excluded elistist thinking created a lot of the problems we nowadays have in the world (e.g. distrust in science)
I get some of those issues raised in that thread and I get why iNat is not for everyone. But I don´t like this sentiment some people there raised of iNat and any IDing activity here being pointless
7 Likes
I thought about putting a link to a tip jar (kofi or similar website) on my profile then when they started asking for money to support iNat I figured people’s money would be better spent there.
I like the idea of limiting the observations per day (or uploads per day) for new users. This might be a way to encourage people to try out and get the hang of using the platform for a bit before they participate in a school project or bioblitz/CNC.
2 Likes
Ivory tower? And people who are funded with public money, based at universities?
1 Like
So this is a pleasant surprise. I went to check how many observations of Cantharellus Cibarius there were for the US (Since testing has shown that this is a strictly european species and research hasn’t had a chance to catch up, see - https://www.mushroomexpert.com/cantharellus_cibarius.html., the full study is here but unfortunately its not a free paper) I figured it’d be easy enough to bump them into genus (or the correct species)
Turns out someone must have done this recently, since there’s only 8 listed for the US. So happily, this is an easy fix!
4 Likes
Oof. If some of the suggestions there had been implemented here I doubt I would have learned nearly as much from this site as I have. You learn by doing in the context of a community that includes experts (inc by making mistakes and being corrected) far more than by being told you just have to ‘wait on the real experts’ (of whom there are nowhere near enough anyway!). And knowing your efforts will never count as much as those of the people with the official credentials regardless of how much knowledge you acquire as an amateur or how much diligence you employ: That supresses the creation of new expertise.
Imagine what would become of identifriday if most of us had no power to actually reduce the NeedsID pile… Imagine how big the pile would be!
10 Likes
just to put things in perspective, i captured the latest numbers from https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_obs_counts_by_iconic_taxa :
iNaturalist Observation Counts by Iconic Taxa
| Iconic Taxon | Verifiable | R Grade | % RG of V | Needs ID | % NID of V | All | Diff All-V | % V of All | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mammals |  |
2,763,500 | 2,359,788 | 85.4 | 403,712 | 14.6 | 3,365,253 | 601,753 | 82.1 |
| Birds |  |
17,994,124 | 16,978,234 | 94.4 | 1,015,890 | 5.6 | 19,865,973 | 1,871,849 | 90.6 |
| Reptiles |  |
2,832,008 | 2,591,365 | 91.5 | 240,643 | 8.5 | 3,025,201 | 193,193 | 93.6 |
| Amphibians |  |
1,742,668 | 1,439,280 | 82.6 | 303,388 | 17.4 | 1,840,701 | 98,033 | 94.7 |
| Ray-Finned Fish |  |
1,296,571 | 1,031,985 | 79.6 | 264,586 | 20.4 | 1,422,830 | 126,259 | 91.1 |
| Mollusks |  |
1,928,532 | 1,172,615 | 60.8 | 755,917 | 39.2 | 1,989,243 | 60,711 | 96.9 |
| Insects |  |
33,032,401 | 18,626,508 | 56.4 | 14,405,893 | 43.6 | 34,027,125 | 994,724 | 97.1 |
| Arachnids |  |
3,656,928 | 1,473,104 | 40.3 | 2,183,824 | 59.7 | 3,770,093 | 113,165 | 97.0 |
| Other Animals |  |
2,359,888 | 1,148,438 | 48.7 | 1,211,450 | 51.3 | 2,471,129 | 111,241 | 95.5 |
| Plants |  |
51,740,254 | 31,118,016 | 60.1 | 20,622,238 | 39.9 | 60,037,198 | 8,296,944 | 86.2 |
| Fungi |  |
7,993,103 | 2,300,817 | 28.8 | 5,692,286 | 71.2 | 8,197,770 | 204,667 | 97.5 |
| Chromista | 170,933 | 82,154 | 48.1 | 88,779 | 51.9 | 176,245 | 5,312 | 97.0 | |
| Protozoa | 195,171 | 52,536 | 26.9 | 142,635 | 73.1 | 199,413 | 4,242 | 97.9 | |
| Unknown | 326,451 | 15,678 | 4.8 | 310,773 | 95.2 | 3,545,641 | 3,219,190 | 9.2 | |
| All |  |
128,032,532 | 80,390,518 | 62.8 | 47,642,014 | 37.2 | 143,933,815 | 15,901,283 | 89.0 |
comparing this to the last snapshot i took in October 2021, it looks like the ratio of research grade observations vs verifiable is improved across the board (yay! 
), although that might be a reflection of a spring (in the northern hemisphere) snapshot vs a fall snapshot:
7 Likes
Oh sorry, Alabama Mushroom Society, they had a small contest to find and ID mushrooms.
1 Like
I’ve got an hour to kill while dinner cooks. I’ve been meaning to start going through this pile for a while - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=31&taxon_id=48339 (this is just Ohio, for now.) Basically red russula species that are just a nightmare to try to ID down to species. (Seriously if you have any interest in mushrooms, may I suggest this absolutely epic breakdown of the mess they are https://www.mushroomexpert.com/russula.html)
Time to go punch the ‘ID is as good as it can get’ button
5 Likes
on this IdentiFriday, i thought i’d try to distinguish between the 3 kinds of grackles in my area: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=110679&quality_grade=needs_id&taxon_id=9599.
5 Likes
I was going to mess around in captive plants a bit since I saw that the CV looks at those and there are lot of mislabeled captive plants from large student groups.
Then I noticed that so many people have marked Homo sapiens as “not wild” that iNat is autoflagging humans and artifacts as captive/cultivated as well in some locations! Anyone remember what the % of records as cultivated triggers the autoflag, and what location size(s) it uses to judge that? (I can’t find the info in the Help section.)
Relatedly, how many matching ids on a captive record does it take to get the record into the CV analysis set? Two like for RG?
Oh, that’s a nice tidy pile of grackle observations to work with! And thanks for reminding me it’s Friday. I’ve moved on from IDing Unknowns from the 2022 CNC to … (insert drumroll) … Unknowns from the 2021 CNC. (yes, I am laughing at myself)
I’m also helping @lotteryd with their State of Matter Life IDs, working on Unknowns from a week ago, and maybe chipping away at the Pre-Mavericks in my region. Never a dull moment!
3 Likes
Hmm, I had assumed that that was an intentional change
I believe it is 80% at county level in the US. From what I’ve personally seen it isn’t instantaneous, if you change all the observations in one go it might still take a day or two for the program to add or remove the taxon.
Interesting about the humans. I know observations of humans are always automatically casual, but I never investigated how they’re casual and whether the not wild DQA box is involved.
1 Like
Great, if it’s as high as 80% then simple countermarking may be able to chip below that level!
Human id’s are made casual separately from other DQA marks, even if just 1 id of the human/artifact. So, there is no need to add additional DQAs*. The marks actually get in the way of identifiers looking to id other things. In this case people interested in captive animals would find a mess of humans in the way (unless they know how to filter them out).
*exception: you may need a second human id, or to tick “good as can be” if there is 1 nondisagreeing id on the obs preceding your human id (like, prior id Life- for some reason these don’t bump into casual like “just human” ids do)
2 Likes
I was doing that a bit in my area (southeast Texas) here and there. I mostly focus on plants though.
Back to working on Pre-Maverick plants for Louisiana and east Texas. I almost finished East Baton Rouge Parish yesterday.
2 Likes