This is the time of year I rarely get to Unknowns or even Family-level observations. Instead, most of what I’m doing is confirming the observations of common plants in my region that are already at species level - SO many Northern Starflowers, Pink Lady’s Slippers, Ragged Robins, Greater Celandine, Marsh Marigolds, and on and on. It’s wonderful that so many New England iNaturalists are observing these plants and already know what they are!
5 Likes
i thought i’d take another snapshot of the results from https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_obs_counts_by_iconic_taxa to see how things stand a month after this year’s CNC. it looks like overall, we have a slightly less favorable RG to Verifiable ratio, but it’s a relatively small difference vs 3 months ago.
the percent of unknown vs all observations has also gone up relatively significantly, but i guess we’ll work that out over time…
today’s snapshot:
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 |  |
3,011,794 | 2,564,218 | 85.1 | 447,576 | 14.9 | 3,651,185 | 639,391 | 82.5 |
| Birds |  |
19,934,198 | 18,813,705 | 94.4 | 1,120,493 | 5.6 | 21,887,141 | 1,952,943 | 91.1 |
| Reptiles |  |
3,127,486 | 2,859,637 | 91.4 | 267,849 | 8.6 | 3,334,825 | 207,339 | 93.8 |
| Amphibians |  |
1,910,208 | 1,580,014 | 82.7 | 330,194 | 17.3 | 2,012,975 | 102,767 | 94.9 |
| Ray-Finned Fish |  |
1,434,973 | 1,141,774 | 79.6 | 293,199 | 20.4 | 1,569,601 | 134,628 | 91.4 |
| Mollusks |  |
2,136,948 | 1,293,161 | 60.5 | 843,787 | 39.5 | 2,201,966 | 65,018 | 97.0 |
| Insects |  |
35,912,310 | 20,161,426 | 56.1 | 15,750,884 | 43.9 | 36,964,622 | 1,052,312 | 97.2 |
| Arachnids |  |
4,017,662 | 1,616,178 | 40.2 | 2,401,484 | 59.8 | 4,139,380 | 121,718 | 97.1 |
| Other Animals |  |
2,618,937 | 1,262,363 | 48.2 | 1,356,574 | 51.8 | 2,739,025 | 120,088 | 95.6 |
| Plants |  |
57,829,806 | 34,461,024 | 59.6 | 23,368,782 | 40.4 | 66,944,222 | 9,114,416 | 86.4 |
| Fungi |  |
8,581,423 | 2,498,137 | 29.1 | 6,083,286 | 70.9 | 8,794,687 | 213,264 | 97.6 |
| Chromista | 189,059 | 89,214 | 47.2 | 99,845 | 52.8 | 194,686 | 5,627 | 97.1 | |
| Protozoa | 211,066 | 57,302 | 27.1 | 153,764 | 72.9 | 215,557 | 4,491 | 97.9 | |
| Unknown | 555,545 | 18,173 | 3.3 | 537,372 | 96.7 | 4,030,518 | 3,474,973 | 13.8 | |
| All |  |
141,471,415 | 88,416,326 | 62.5 | 53,055,089 | 37.5 | 158,680,390 | 17,208,975 | 89.2 |
snapshot from March 2023:
3 Likes
Once upon a Friday, this was a Life-level pre-maverick, but now check it out!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/7973000
5 Likes
When I see a plant that is clearly cultivated (in a pot, recognizable cultivar, etc.) I have been making this comment:
This looks like a cultivated plant. iNaturalist is intended for wild organisms. You might try the app PlantNet for an identification of this plant.
Is it bad to suggest a specific plant identification app? There are so many.
1 Like
I’ve referred people to the Plant Idents page on Facebook. The people there are very very good with cultivated material. So I’d say, It’s OK to suggest a resource. Others may disagree, of course.
2 Likes
Anyone for pelargoniums. Cultivated. I’ve been thru them, but they need one or two more IDs to tip out of genus. About 90 left.
20 down, thanks.
I’ve been doing bee triage in Germany/central Europe and it just isn’t sustainable. I need to change something. I’ve been spending too much time that I should be using for other things and I still can’t keep up.
Mostly, I am tired.
Tired of correcting whatever the CV has decided is the suggestion du jour for skinny dark bees, or bees visiting yellow flowers, or bees with large pollen loads, or whatever. Tired of users accepting wildly inaccurate suggestions that aren’t even on the right continent. Tired of people not being able to distinguish bees and flies.
Tired of squinting at blurry photos and trying to decide whether I can justify an ID – or a disagreement – based on my sense of what “looks right” even though the concrete morphological features used to determine the genus are not clearly visible.
Tired of users blindly accepting whatever ID I suggest. Tired of consequently feeling like I cannot suggest IDs for species I am still not very confident about because my tentative ID will immediately result in a “research-grade” observation.
Tired of not feeling free, for all of the above reasons, to spend my time in ways that would feel more rewarding – learning new species, or figuring out interesting observations.
Also tired of the difficulty of establishing any kind of effective collaboration or division of labor with a subset of the other active IDers. Tired of deliberately not adding IDs to certain readily IDable species because, rather than disburdening people with more expertise than me by reducing the total number of “needs ID” observations, it only results in my notifications exploding several times a year when someone goes through and adds a third or fourth confirming ID to all observations of these species. Tired of feeling judged and found wanting by certain experts who have strong opinions about how iNat should work, even when these opinions do not align with the reality on iNat. Tired of the one-way communication that results from said experts being quite willing to leave comments to others in observations, while simultaneously choosing themselves to not follow notifications or @ mentions and require that they be contacted by message instead.
3 Likes
While we wait for better management of notifications, I unfollow obs where I don’t want to see that again. For me either I can’t add more it is now beyond my skills, or I have informed agreement tick.
For identifiers we need better triage. I see myself as a middle identifier, picking thru Unknowns and conflicts to move obs to where the taxon specialist can filter for them. Trying deliberately to reduce the workload and bubble up the interesting stuff. (I have only had pushback from one scientist)
There is way too much in Needs ID and I try to make best use of my time.
Much appreciate make this system work for you and the Pre-Maverick project. We find some good stuff. First obs on iNat makes the drudge work worthwhile. Sometimes, we can make sad scientists happy.
2 Likes
I have been thinking about whether it makes sense to develop a preemptive copy and paste comment to add when I ID to species for users I don’t recognize. We get a lot of tourists and it just isn’t plausible that they know all these species they “Agree” with. I know these people don’t realize this is viewed as a problem by many people who ID.
I also recognize how important it is for experts to revisit the Research Grade observations to confirm/correct IDs. I’m sorry people doing that in your aren’t supportive.
1 Like
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-are-photos-selected-for-cv-training/42403/28
See Susan Hewitt’s comments about left and right shells.
Perhaps you can offer some bees on that thread?
it’s okay to step away from identifying and prioritizing other things in life. for most of us, iNaturalist is not a job. so it doesn’t make sense to keep pushing if it’s causing you to sacrifice your own personal happiness.
#identiFriday should be the happiest day of the week. so if not identifying is the best path to happiness on any given Friday, that’s all good. we’ll always welcome you back with open arms when you’re ready to start identifying again.
i do this sometimes because it leaves some good tasks for beginners to do, or alternatively, gives me something to do on rare occasions when i need something easy to do as a diversion from other things.
9 Likes
Oh, hello!
I’ve never been very active on the forums, but here you all are, my companions in IDs! I will try to remember to visit and keep up.
My current routine is to stay current on New York State plants, and do some Northeast US from time to time.
Sometimes I find a pile of potentially easy stuff that could use a second (most recently NE US Achillea millefolium and Clethra). Is this the place to share those?
Thanks to all of you who have advanced my broad IDs. It’s a thrill!
Patti in the Hudson Valley of New York
US
7 Likes
Yes. This is where you find identifiers ‘looking for work to do’ somewhere to help.
We started with IdentiFriday, but it became every day.
2 Likes
Anyone else have a species that isn’t common but distinctive, but also no one bothers to ID it, so you’re stuck with non-research grade observations because you’re one of the only people bothering to ID it?
Because oh man there’s one mushroom I have that problem with and its driving me nuts XD
5 Likes
Can you @mention off the leaderboard?
Could you teach us how to ID the species, whatever it is? Maybe mention an off-iNaturalist site (or even a book, gasp!) that gives characters for ID? It’s Friday here and time to learn a new species to ID!
2 Likes
I feel your pain about people blindly agreeing, I avoid making suggestions if I’m not very confident because of this as well.
That said, I don’t know that people are always blindly agreeing. I extend that sort of caution to my own observations, so sometimes if I’m only 99% sure I’ll use whatever I’m certain about as my initial ID. When someone comes along and suggests whatever I was only 99% sure about, I’ll then consider it more closely and agree. I’m sorry if this is annoying, I’m just not very confident about this yet so I tend to err on the side of caution.
5 Likes
Hah, fair enough! I honestly just didn’t think about it, since its a species with less than 500 observations - Sutorius eximius is the species, specifically
https://boletes.wpamushroomclub.org/product/tylopilus-eximius/#lightbox/1/ this page does a pretty decent job of going over them. Key identifiers
-dark chocolate brown pores, young buttons they look almost black: This is a fairly good identifier, there are very few boletes with pore surfaces this dark and they usually tend towards reddish-brown not chocolate brown.
-dark brown cap, can have a whitish bloom when young, smooth surface
-purplish-brown stem with scabers (scabers are basically like…little dark dots of raised flesh on the stem
-Spore print: reddish-brown to amber according to my book, though IMHO not necessary for IDs and I don’t think any of the observations on iNat have an attached spore print. (at least not that I’ve seen)
-Flesh, when cut, bruises reddish brown to purple
-Mychorrhizal with conifers, especially hemlock
and a few pictures
See how the stalks look dotted?
This shows the color of the bruising
There is another species in this genus described from Australia (S. australiensis) and one from China (S.subrufus) - and a few others, if you look at the taxonomic tree on iNat - but overall the genus seems relatively poorly documented. Seriously, just look at how few observations there are on the taxonomic list https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/504376-Sutorius
I would be cautious IDing anything to species level that isn’t in the Americas, anything in Asia/Australia region is probably one of the other species.
3 Likes
I don’t know if this should get its own thread, but it’s something that’s come up during my IDing efforts, so here it is.
What (if anything) should people do if a user changes an observation’s photo to something else entirely?
I noticed one user’s observations were captioned as including certain animals and the initial IDs backed this up, but they didn’t seem to be visible in the pictures at all, leading to conflicting IDs and the observations getting “stuck”. One user chimed in to say the pictures had been changed between the initial IDs and the more recent ones, hence the confusion. The new pictures just show the general area.
If it makes a difference, I don’t think this was malicious at all. The user who made these observations seems like an older person, and maybe not very tech-savvy, so it could have been an accident.
What (if anything) would be the right thing to do here? Thank you :)
The IDs should reflect the evidence provided. I’d suggest @ mentioning the other identifiers and let them know the photo has been changed and that they should re-evaluate their IDs.
3 Likes