That may be taxon-specific. I come across a lot of old observations that I can easily “Agree,” and I suspect it is a case of them being too quickly buried under new ones.
Or, you may be looking at even older ones than I am.
I’ve been plinking away at Australia’s unknowns, and there’s definitely a lot of easy IDs that have been sitting in there for months (or years!) just because they happened to get buried. Birds, spiders, big showy mushrooms, etc… They’re just hidden in amongst all the plants and school projects that have taken dozens of photos of dirt. :D
there too - the obvious ones - which have been hidden in very broad IDs which slide into limbo. I target those (for my location)
I work on Pre-Mavericks, too, and on the Unknowns. And then I go work on an individual plant species and its genus in my region and then in neighboring states or provinces. And then I browse through all of the most recent uploads for my region and confirm the easy mammals or Monarchs or Wood Frogs (not birds, though; there are enough bird identifiers). Once in a while, I’ll look at Plantae at the Kingdom level in my region; sometimes I can pull a few down to species or genus, or mark as cultivated and push them to Casual.
And then repeat, over and over. Spring is coming soon here, though, and then I won’t have time for all this identifying; I’ll have to be out photographing and uploading my own observations.
For all my whining, there are much worse ways I could be spending my days.
It may depend of the number of people “active” on that taxon or the area it is true. When I say “old”, I’m thinking about obs that are 5 years old or older. On most of the searches I did, there was some “easy stuff” left, but it was mostly unsolved conflicts, garden plants or really hard to tell apart species. I consider in that case only obs that got a finer ID first (family or genus), because for the others it is easier to get “stuck” in the limbo if they are not refined on time. Out of curiosity, what time frame did you have in mind ?
For stuff that was posted in 2021 and after, it is true that some of really easy to identify obs got buried in the masses, especially in area where identifiers are less active, and very broad ID can also stay there for forever until someones is doing broad/ based on location ID.
That depends on what comes up. If I’m going in ascending order, the time frame is whatever is the oldest observation. Sometimes, I will find easy ones even as old as 5–7 years, especially if I am doing one person’s observations. Some people have, for example, multiple plant observations, for which they provided initial IDs that somehow just never got seconded.
I see a lot of really old easy to ID plant obs. A lot of people don’t go through old stuff with an ID such as Dicots assuming everything left is hard to ID stuff.
Here are a few from 2018 I just found and IDed to species in just a few minutes:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/11659903
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17950096
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17387416
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17939389
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17905730
^this last one is stuck at flowering plants due to monocot/dicot disagreement if anyone wants to help with that
Now that last observation is at genus, at least.
The last few days I’ve been going through Sambucus in Ontario (maybe 1500 Needs ID observations? so many!) and I’ve found several older observations that were easy to ID to species. If I’m IDing a particular species, I routinely look at all of the Needs ID observations for that species in my region/state/province of choice. Often enough, there are perfectly good older observations that can reach Research Grade with one or sometimes two IDs.
I got a couple of them to RG.
multi-species observations needing the DQA mark, unless the observer did fix them
(don’t forget to take off your default place if needed/desired)
Batch 1 COMPLETE
Batch 2 COMPLETE
Batch 3 RG ones reviewed, Needs ID ones still not reviewed
Batch 4
Batch 5
Batch 6
Batch 7
Batch 8
Batch 9
Batch 10
Batch 11
Batch 12
Batch 13
Batch 14
Batch 15
Batch 16
Batch 17
Batch 18
Batch 19
Batch 20
Batch 21
(more links in another post: I hit a character limit.)
Did you find these by searching for certain comments?
Peeled out the African ones including Batch 9 (note to self in case you update links there)
10 to 18 Africa done
19 to 21 also.
Someone has used the new DQA. Then deleted their account? As I open the obs to apply the DQA … their previous click cancels itself. Haunting.
I did run into a character limit, so here’s part 2
multi-species observations needing the DQA mark, unless the observer did fix them
(don’t forget to take off your default place if needed/desired)
Batch 1 COMPLETE
Batch 2 COMPLETE
Batch 3 (RG ones complete)
Batch 4
Batch 5
Batch 6
Batch 7
Batch 8
Batch 9
batch 19
batch 20
batch 21
part 3
multi-species observations needing the DQA mark, unless the observer did fix them
(don’t forget to take off your default place if needed/desired)
Batch 1 COMPLETE
Batch 2 COMPLETE
Batch 3
Batch 4
Batch 5
Batch 6
Batch 7
Batch 8
Batch 9
Batch 10
Batch 11
Batch 12
Batch 13
Batch 14
Batch 15
Batch 16
Batch 17
Batch 18
Yes. It was all the stand-alone comments (not those embedded in IDs) that ever linked my how-to-split-an-observation tutorial (English version) between when I wrote the tutorial and the day the new DQA line came out. However Loarie made the links for me, so I don’t know how he did it. He posted them here–I was finding it too hard on my eyes so I reformatted them.
The experience really depends a lot on taxon and area of expertise. In spiders there are soooo many observations being stuck at order or even only class (arachnida… but there is some recent effort to push them further). Usually it is not too hard to get them to family or genus for people knowing something about spiders.
I am IDing in Taiwan since several weeks now and did about 5500 IDs so far… I usually start with the oldest… I still have a long way to go to the most recent observations. The youngest I have IDed now are about 4 years old (few exceptions when I saw a new one coming in I was able to put to species). I put 1700 observations to family or subfamily level, which as I said should normally not be a very hard task for any spiderIDer. About 1000 observations I was able to put to RG as it only required agreeing with an initial ID (or someone agreed with me after I put my ID… but that were not so many at species level)… Those were easy IDs I would say, so about half of the IDs I did I would count to thos “burried” observations just nobody ever had time to look at
Not many from South America, but I guess is kind to be expected
There are Spanish and Portuguese translations of the tutorial, which may have been better search terms for that part of the world.
Very interesting, thank you for the insight !
I tried to get a lot of those out of class last month, it was great to see folks like you, paolosol, and others identify them further. thanks!