Thank you! And thank you to @jasonhernandez74, too!
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The reason the first page was all sound recordings was that I’d identified the plants as Dicots. No great improvement over Unknown, I know, but true. Eventually I found a few I could ID to genus, plus a few monocots. Even an insect, I think. At least this minimal sorting of the dregs goes fast.
It’s frustrating to see photos of “Unknowns” that consist of several plants (some of them sticks) equally prominent, so we don’t know which to ID. I think that if one can label anything in such photos, one should do that. I didn’t realize that at first, though.
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I have 2 I return to, as the discussion bubbled up with new taxon specialists. Is. Is Not. Because.
This one has mystified people all the way back to prehistoric rock art!
(see andrasz comment)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/56944372
Madagascan silk angel from lendebeer
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/106687320
Newly described species (and now there are about 5 new species, find one, find more!)
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If it’s any consolation, the best I can ID many observations is as Dicots as well.
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Yes, I usually name something. If I know the name for more than one species shown, I try to pick the species that a second person will more likely confirm. Or a couple times I have unintentionally started an argument by favoring the wild weed over the also-present cultivated plant.
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Recently IDing or narrowing down old Asteraceae and Poales obs in southeast Texas
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Interestingly, something similar happened with the audio. One recording had a Passerine singing and a wild pigeon calling.
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It’s amazing, the uncanny knack these people have for posting photos with absolutely no useful features in them.
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Beginners. Very much beginners. Plus, of course, these are the dregs with the good ones mostly identified already.
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I worked on some, using random sorting to mix things up and avoid overlapping with other users who might also simultaneously be working on this set of observations.
Mostly it has reminded me why I don’t generally ID unknowns (lots of respect for those of you who do have the patience to do so). I realize these particular unknowns have already been largely picked over and what is left is likely the difficult stuff or the things nobody wants to deal with.
Still: so many potted plants.
It seems there was a group of users in Telangana, India, who wandered around a plant nursery taking photos of all the seedlings and cuttings lined up in sacks waiting for transplanting. I went through the observations of a few of these users, marking everything applicable as “not wild”, but now I need to go do something that feels a bit more constructive for a while.
There are also still a surprising number of multiple species observations in this set – often someone has already looked at them and added a comment asking the users to split up the photos, but no ID. Since we need a minimum of 2 IDs for the “ID cannot be improved” button to work, please do add an appropriate ID when you encounter such observations; it speeds up the process of being able to take such observations out of “needs ID” if the observer never comes back to fix them.
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Sob - at our last CNC someone, who remains nameless, managed a whole thousand photos of nursery, then garden plants.
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Yes!
Also, I would be grateful if, instead of just leaving a note saying “garden plant,” other IDers would mark as cultivated as well. Thanks for considering.
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Oh, yes. To the Dicot Dungeon with them!
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At least those observations would be easy to filter for.
Shameless self promotion for the tool I’ve made to help get some of these things out of the needs ID pool: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/new-chrome-extension-to-select-that-the-community-taxon-cannot-be-improved/47239
Although 2 IDs are needed before the system will mark these observations which are unable to be improved as casual…
Could also make another shortcut for evidence of organism: none if that would help y’all dealing with these.
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Hey, we’ve cleaned up over 100 pages (at 30 observations per page) of Unknowns left from the 2023 CNC! Nice work, everyone!
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Of course, for some families – such as Araceae – that just comes with the territory.
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I have looked at all the Cape Town GSB obs!
Now I can turn my, go slow, attention to the piles of Unknowns that accumulated during my first holiday from iNat in 5 years.
Africa mostly plants as ever
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I do sweep the blindingly obvious commonorgarden straight to Casual.
The ones I leave waiting for more eyes, are the more interesting ones - if Cultivated they will mostly miss out on the chance of any ID.
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Is that because experts don’t knowingly ID cultivated plants?