I go through the cultivated unknowns and plantae every now and then and see follow-up on my ID suggestions by experts who obviously know much more about them than I do. So I venture a guess that there are some taxon experts on iNat who actually specialize on things like typical houseplants or garden cultivars. Those are exceptions though, once marked cultivated they get a lot less ID attention.
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It’s nice when those experts can find the petunias and tulips where expected.
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I know a fair amount about cultivated plants, so if I see something like a peony or a tulip or an ornamental sage, I’ll ID it to genus and then mark it as cultivated.
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Someone carefully spelled out the garden pansy ish species - but I can’t, so I leave them at a broad ID and keyboard shortcut X for Not Wild. I will also follow, if I would like to know what that is for next time. I also battle with cultivated exotic succulents. Graptoveria … ??
And I swept a huge chunk out of my African Unknowns - another Opted Out of CID - so identifiers have made the effort. But the obs stay smugly at Unknown regardless!
Is it possible mark as Reviewed everything from ‘that observer’?
Yes. You’re in desktop? In IDentify, use filters to enter user name. When you get screen of observations, click on “mark all as reviewed”. Refresh and repeat until search is clear
If that’s not clear, please ask questions.
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If you want to get an Unknown out of Unknowns where the observer has opted out of the community taxon, you can ID it as best you can, invite another identifier to ID it also, and mark it as best as it can be. I believe that if the observers agree, the observation then goes to Casual.
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6 posts were split to a new topic: Issue with a user’s observations not appearing
Now that it’s Friday again, time to revisit this.
I’m doing cleanup of American Robin, ascending order. A lot of the observations are of tracks or empty nests, and I can’t help with those, but as for distant or backlit birds – GISS is real. If someone asked me what my ID was based on, in many cases I would say, “It’s based on the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of robins that I’ve seen in my life.” From every angle and distance and in every lighting condition.
There are also some really clear audio files which I was surprised were still at Needs ID.
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For some reason I just can’t hear audio files from iNat very clearly. They always come through muffled on speaker, so I don’t ID them despite knowing North American bird calls very well. I can hear audio from other websites just fine.
The CNC has started its training for organizers. In the December CNC organizer asynchronous meeting notes, there is explicit information about encouraging wild and natural observations. And, I added my iNat or iNot slide deck to the CNC shared resource file. I think it will be slow ship to turn, but I do think we can reduce the number of people planted plants observations.
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did they also encourage organizers to recruit identifiers?
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The CNC has two parts - making observations and identifying what was found.
I’ll keep an eye out for how the CNC supports local organizers in recruiting and training identifiers. If anyone has some generic training materials a la the iNat or iNot or wants to do an identifiers training, I’d be happy to help facilitate a connection with CNC as I am a local organizer. I’m guessing there are others here who could also make that connection.
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while this may be true, i’ve always interpreted this as being a time for observers to go back and identify their own observations, not necessarily for helping others identify.
if it’s not already explicitly stated, it would be nice for them to explicitly suggest that observers not only identify their own observations during this time but also help identify other people’s observations, too
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For whatever reason … I was delighted this time around (GSB) not to see so many garden plants. Still recovering from the horrific full thousand from a single observer for CNC!
Cape Town’s GSB had 331 observers generously supported by 537 identifiers. Including many international taxon specialists. Thank you!
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The CNC website does have a section on iNaturalist identification. I’ll have to go through the organizer’s handbook again to see what they say about recruiting identifiers.
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I was recently excited to pass 400 observations after three and a half years, so I guess it is a matter of perspective.
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I sometimes wish we had a laughing emoji like they do on facebook.
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Oh my god!
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That is certainly true for me. I have a taxon that I record wherever I go, no matter how many times I have recorded it before, and I regularly review what those observations show about distribution and species richness for that taxon. Likewise the great bulk of my IDs are in a very few taxa because that’s what I’m comfortable with. To each their own!
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I was just writing a friend about what I accomplished in 2023 (we’re planners at heart and we goad each other along). I went to my year-end review statistics to quote her the numbers and realized I only need to do 300 IDs to reach 70,000 for the year, which is insane (and I mean that in all senses of the word insane). So, of course, I’m going to do that before January 1st.
(No, I am NOT, NOT, NOT setting a goal of 80,000 IDs in 2024. I like to pretend I retain some shred of sanity.)
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