Wow, what an alien beauty
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The City Nature Challenge starts Friday of NEXT WEEK. Yikes.
There aren’t enough hours in a day.
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What an incredible observation!
But also good luck with handling the unknowns. That’s always a huge task but I can only imagine what it’ll be like during CNC
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This year I will focus on Rest of Africa - never got to them last time! Cape Peninsula and Western Cape I will tidy up, later.
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A confession: I’ve given up IDing Unknowns. Oh, once in a while, I’ll see an Unknown where the organism is cultivated and I’ll ID it and mark it as Not Wild to get it out of the Needs ID pile quickly, but mostly I just don’t, any more.
For one thing, I got burnt out. For another, I think adding IDs that move an observation to, or closer to, Research Grade is a higher priority for me. Thirdly - and this is part of being burnt out, I think - it feels like IDing Unknowns is “rewarding” observers who haven’t put any effort into learning how iNat works, while at the same time burdening identifiers with observations that are often unidentifiable to genus or species levels.
So, I stopped. I’ll probably ID the Unknowns in the CNC I help coordinate, but otherwise, no. I only feel mildly guilty.
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Against that burnt out feeling, I follow tiwane’s advice - it is okay to mark as reviewed and move on.
If - I wanted to rack up my ID quota to astronomical numbers - I could go thru my No ID Reviewed for Africa - and click dicot till my hands fall off.
I prefer to choose what I focus my effort on. The - oh, wow, what is that ??
If it is Not in Focus, Does Not Show Field Marks. Next!
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ID what you want, I say!
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The nice thing about doing so is you can add phenology, which is another way to filter. There are many reasons for adding broad IDs. That’s why you’ve added fungal IDs at kingdom thousands of times, right? Not for some personal glory.
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I am not interested enough in fungi to tease out the differences.
But I know from today’s notifications that fungi is the first step to getting a finer ID, and so it goes …
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I frequently ID some unknowns in Germany and I get that feeling. There was a person who uploaded hundreds of different observations of single pictures of the bark of different trees, with the occasional “far away shot” thrown in that didn’t help much either. (idk whether tree bark is enough to identify trees, but I’m not really interested in identifying trees, so I don’t know).
I honestly have never felt so much contempt for the existence of trees before than after that. Haha. (Okay, no, I love trees, but anyway…)
I agree with peakaytea that you should just identify what you want to identify.
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I also absolutely get that… stop what you do if it feels like a burden. After all, this is your spare time and you should enjoy it.
That being said - I see you, you tireless unknown-IDers! The asian batch I am working on has a lot of observations lifted from limboland to Araneae… the only reason why I find those observations now.
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After a lot of work by myself and others, every day I check in to see how many total obs stuck at Arachnida there are (that I haven’t reviewed) and it’s no more than a few dozen. Huzzah!
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That is fantastic - congrats to you and your co-identifiers!
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I always know when I push an observation to that level that you will be right behind me 
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Then folks like you and paolo will get on those spider IDs quick! Thanks!
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You could comment instead – use a copypasta about the fact that many observers filter by taxon, etc. One that I have seen and appropriated says, “Add your own ID at the narrowest level you feel comfortable with, for example, “plants” or “beetles”. Observations with an ID are much more likely to be identified. If you leave your observations like this rarely anyone will look at them.”
Then move on. The ball’s in their court now.
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I’ve tried doing that, but I don’t think it makes any difference, as far as I can see where I’ve tried it. I think these observers, many of whom are new, don’t have any idea they need to check their notifications (which, of course, means they don’t see my comment). I can’t blame them, really; it’s a bit of a learning curve to figure out how iNat works.
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Nobody with an ID count in six figures needs to feel guilty about anything!
But I’m curious, when you have been identifying unknowns, have you felt compelled to try resolving everything? I only have a handful of taxa I’m comfortable identifying, so whenever I check the unknowns, there’s a lot of scrolling to find only a tiny percentage I can ID. It’s probably a poor use of my time, but trying to ID all of them…well, I know that’s just impossible for me.
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It took me about a year to realise … notifications … need … to be responded to. Oops! Absolutely, guilty as charged.
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I know it is ‘following iNat guidelines’ but it makes me sad when newbies obs slide from honest Unknowns, where they might be seen - to iNat’s Plantae compost bin.
More frustrating since I have realised that iNat does not just hide the (potential) placeholder - the observer’s text is destroyed, and cannot be retrieved.