My current CNC totals
Baton Rouge: 813
Houston: 344
San Antonio: 70
Dallas/Fort Worth: 26
Plants: 735
Fungi: 207
Birds: 155
Other Vertebrates: 92
Arthropods: 42
Life disagreements: 18
High level animal disagreements: 4
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Are these newer/inexperienced users?
When I’ve seen this happen, my impression is that they are generally people who are just excited as they discover iNat and its features, and they likely think they are being helpful and don’t realize why they shouldn’t automatically trust the CV, or they may not fully realize what it means when they click the button to enter that ID.
Often such users seem to mostly ID observations of their friends rather than random users, but the CNC may have the effect of making people want to see what has been observed in their city and thus engaging with those observations by adding IDs.
I also know some CNC organizers have put out an effort at encouraging people to not just observe, but also help ID, so maybe this has been misunderstood by some users?
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I’ve been alternating between going through butterflies and going through unknowns but setting both to random and 100 per page. It’s fun when I randomly find something I can ID to species in the unknowns pile
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I’m doing a “CV Assist” part of my IDing workflow so I can review it later for “accuracy”. More details when I ask for help some other Friday maybe. ;)
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maybe, but that’s not that right way to go about it. thanks for helping to do some IDs in my area (Houston).
i kicked out a bunch of strange-looking identifications there, and now i’m going through some of the disagreements that have occurred there to see if i can push things one way or the other.
some look new, but others have been using the platform for a while. these odd identifications seem to be for random other users. (usually when i see folks identifying for their friends, they’re just blindly agreeing, not picking new IDs from CV.)
i think people just put too much faith in technology sometimes, not realizing that technology has its limitations.
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That’s the closest CNC to me. I usually do a lot for Baton Rouge though since I started using iNaturalist when I lived there and I still get asked to help out with IDs for CNC. They don’t have as many prolific IDers as Houston.
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Was this the thread where I said I wanted to make a thousand observations for the CNC and then three times that many IDs?
HA.
Not even close. Perfectly respectable numbers, but not even close. I need to remember there are limits to my energy and the number of hours in a day.
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I am still busy in Asia for sure … but I got sidetracked like a weak-willed ballon floating in the wind… I think it was @DianaStuder this time who tagged me on an observation in Kenya a few days ago? And now I am mind-travelling around in mid-Afrika. Not too many Aranae observations there, so this should be a quicky, but look what I found waiting around for 6 years and becoming an iNat first. Got me hungry for more 
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And in terms of animal-observation, also sometimes in them being present and still enough to take at least one decent picture.
I was in the woods for 4-5 hours yesterday and only got 80 observations. (I did get a lot of blurry „take off“ shots, though.) I was ready to toss away my phone after the 10th cool lifer vanished without me getting a photo. :,)
In terms of identification, I have great respect for anybody who sifts through observations for hours everyday. I just can’t do it for that long.
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I did about 4K IDs for CNC … plodding on, determined to get back to ‘where I started before’
Sounds of hollow laughter echo.
Ultimately over 6K
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I went back to my pet project of european pisaurids for a while… did not do it for the winter months and now there were almost 2000 new needs ID… should not leave it unattented for too long 
The Argiope on the other hand seem to be well evaluated without me now and I feel less pressured to work on them at the moment… I just do them every once in a while now - mostly agreeing to suggestions other ArgiopeIDers have made before me.
And I am biting away on those 210000 Aranae observations on zoosubsection or higher level bit by bit… sometimes I am reviewing specific regions (did some islands which is quite fun; still busy in Asia, specifically HongKong and India), sometimes just worldwide and see what I can do… will keep me busy for the next few years I guess 
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i love to hear this sort of thing
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tiwane has written a new Help - if you want to lure in new identifiers to help us.
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I went to a plant sale last Saturday and got an aspidistra. That sent me down a rabbit hole of reading papers on the genus, which ended up with me doing a sweep of “Needs ID” Aspidistra elatior observations.
Most were not aspidistra. At least one was not even a monocot! The three taxa most often identified as “Aspidistra elatior” were Cordyline fruticosa, Dracaena fragrans, and what I think is another Dracaena species. Well, I suppose I should be glad that they got the right family. On many of these, I left the comment, “It has a trunk”; that in itself immediately rules out aspidistra.
A few observations in southern China and Southeast Asia were other aspidistra species, as revealed by their flowers.
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How is this for #IdentiFriday?
(It’s my own observation, linking on purpose for the thread).
Paper out yesterday, a lovely curator added it today, so our lab got all our observations ID’d correctly on here now. New genus & species.
Link to paper (open access) https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/119986/
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14 posts were merged into an existing topic: Uploading “common” species
Good idea. I don’t do your “love bombing,” exactly, but I frequently try to reciprocate. When someone IDs a bunch of my OBs, I get curious and check their profile to see who they are, where they are, what they observe, and whether I can ID anything of theirs. Sometimes I can help. Often not.
I will generally not ID something that is not a species I have personally observed and have confidence in identifying.
I must say, there’s something quite addictive about identifying. Friday? Saturday! Sunday! Monday! every day! And it can be dark/raining/cold outside! And you don’t even have to put on shoes/hats/insect repellant!
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Not a huge deal, but I finished a big identification goal of mine which was reviewing every single Atocion observations (the more than 4500 of them)!
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That’s fantastic! Do you know what you’ll tackle next, or are you going to reward yourself by making XX number of observations next?
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Thanks! I think I’ll take a break from plants (oddly enough, they’re not my main area of focus). I’ve still been going around the Caribbean identifying herps, so I think I’ll continue that! I’ve already finished the Bahamas, Bermuda, Turks and Caicos, and Cayman Islands. There are a bunch of observations and so many islands, so this’ll probably be a long ongoing project!
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