I know the CNC identification period is only half over, but I must say that 31,852 pages of Needs ID observations at 30 observations per page is a bit daunting. That’s about 955,560 observations in total, globally.
ETA: But it’s less than 2% of all Needs ID observations on iNat. That doesn’t seem so bad.
Ope, now I’m wondering if the hollies I’ve uploaded are truly the american species or if they’re remnant trees from when people used to have houses in the area.
But we are getting there. Tony monitors the stats for Cape Town, next targets to get Needs ID to 50%, and Unknowns to 10% (I will be there)
Hi all… I think I will be more regularly back in the IDing-game now. My little parasite seems to have decided to let me get back into the game ;-)
I do admire the Cape Town CNC ability to stay on top of their IDs
(time to go and do my daily stint!)
Look good to me; hybrids used these days are pretty different looking.
Woo, good.
CVNP has a LOT of plots that are old homesteads (like really old, like 15x15 depressions in the dirt with maybe the remnants of a fireplace and some stone foundations remaining) so there’s a lot of spots where you find plants that were at one point garden plants - stuff like spanish bluebells, crocuses, and daffodils
That is cool; we have some daffis near the old homestead site at our place, it was neat learning about them, it was apparently a popular variety in the early-mid 1800’s. How neat is that?! I never thought about garden plants going in and out of popular favor means they can be used to help date sites.
There are gardeners collecting old varieties of roses from cemeteries in the USA.
Probably similar projects for old varieties of fruit trees? @s_k_johnsgaard would know.
Definitely projects in Britain for old apple varieties. Also plants in hedgerows that go back to the Romans. Botanical archaeology?
This is my first CNC and I am so looking forward to helping the ID efforts. Unfortunately, I recently moved and I am having internet issues. So I can do a little on my phone, but don’t have unlimited data to plow through a lot of observations.
Do you think my ISP will be moved by me saying, “It is urgent that I add broad identifications to wildlife observations from around the world and mark not wild organisms as captive/cultivated!”
Even worse than not being able to add new IDs is the growing pile of unattended notifications from IDs I added last weekend. 
Here’s a heretical thought for the Friday during the CNC identification period: What if we identifiers never IDed any Unknowns?
I ask because sometimes I feel that IDing Unknowns is either rewarding people who can’t be bothered to upload IDs as or soon after they upload observations, or giving feedback to people (students, mostly, I think) who will never look at iNat again once the CNC or other class assignment is over.
The Unknowns are a very small percentage of all iNat observations (0.0032% at the moment), so ignoring them won’t affect the overall mass of data very much.
Sometimes I think I ID lots of Unknowns because doing so appeals to my sense of completion (start at the beginning of a task, work to the end), when in fact my ID skills could be better used elsewhere.
I have certainly done that when I see student groups doing things en masse here; you know, 10-15 different uploads with no ID on it of the same garden plant, probably told by their teacher to practice. I leave a note about how to put an ID on it and the vimo link to using the phone aps, and saying I’m gonna leave it unknown so they can practice doing the entire process as their teacher likely intended. (worded lot better than I just did the tldr but you get the idea)
Then I click the “done” with that page and move on.
I would certainly be on board with doing that for the CNCs, because they are more likely to see it and fix it themselves, too, being so active during that time.
That’s a good idea to paste a note about adding an initial ID, at least for recently added observations - maybe within the last week?
I will often use the filters to set the time range to something ending before the current semester. That way I can focus on older observations and avoid interfering with class projects. Once the semester is over and presumably classes have ended and everybody has received their final grades, I’ll go back and add IDs to all the leftover unknowns. I mostly do it because I like to ID unknowns and find it rewarding in itself. I don’t really think of it as rewarding observers. I wished I had more time to participate but this year’s CNC overlaps with our crazy end of semester going into final exams period, so I’ve got another final to prep and more grading to do before I can be of any help.
I agree in that far: if you are skilled elsewhere, use those skills rather than doing unknowns. (Unless unknowns are what you WANT to do of course.) I only ID unknowns when I am up to date with the few taxa I can ID to species/genus level.
I just finished New Mexico CNC unknowns last night. I think about 10% were uploaded blank here. Since I was active throughout the weekend, I don’t know the exact number, but the last chunk I worked on was about 800. In this case, I would rather get them done myself, because locally I can usually ID species or subspecies right away and otherwise another user will come along and add “Plants” and it gets buried in the pile. I left comments last Friday on certain active users about uploading unknowns and marking garden plants; there was no noticeable change in behavior during the CNC.
For that matter, iNaturalist could program its platforms either to make unknowns impossible to upload, or to automatically apply the computer vision suggestion if the user makes no suggestion of their own. (Hopefully the automatic suggestion would appear in a new way that is more like a searchable tag and less like an ID that needs to be out-voted if wrong.) But there have been other threads about both those ideas, and I must conclude staff doesn’t want to do it, presumably because they don’t think the presence of unknowns is problematic. This is speculation of course.
iNat gives users a warning about unidentified observations when one uploads them via the website. I wouldn’t be surprised if that feature weren’t added to the app at some point.
Related (somewhat?) feature request: Automatic iNat suggestion for “unknown” observations that reach a certain age