I definitely move on before finishing things. I did about 100 Northern Cardinal audio observations this past week and am now tired of it. It’s a lot slower than going through photos. The previous week I was working on Eastern Cottontail vs Swamp Rabbit including checking RG observations. I really like working on this because I like seeing all the bunnies, but after a seeing a few too many roadkill bunnies with their entrails hanging out I had to stop.
PS Seeing roadkill doesn’t usually bother me, but seeing dead wild rabbits reminds me of seeing my pet rabbits dead. I thought about stopping to take a photo of a roadkill red fox last week (would be my first photo of that species), but I was running late and I was too tired on my way home. Was going to stop the next day but it was raining. I figured it would smell really bad after all the rain and decided to give up on the idea.
Sometimes I remind myself that trying to increase observations would be harder than trying to increase IDs. The herbaria are backed up also. It helps me keep calm haha
That’s a good point! Which reminds me, there are 30 or so bryophyte specimens on my dining room table that need keying out, and my hopes for a nice haul from the moth traps last night were thwarted by light showers. Sometimes IDing is much, much easier than making observations.
Yeah I just realized that a pretty easy to ID genus for me has over 300 pages of unconfirmed obs! And I’ve just been bopping around another couple genera too. In general though I’ve moved from doing concerted work from the back through every single ob forward that needs IDs to just hitting ‘random’ for the genera I’m working on, but I think I’ll methodically work through this one!
Yes, I too do IDing when I don’t feel like working on adding observations. I have a bunch of lichens and grasses I’ve been meaning to key out since I borrowed some books about them. I also have a bunch of things where I took a whole lot of photos and have to go through and find the best ones.
It’s Friday, my companion identifiers! On July 22nd, just over three weeks ago, the iNat blog announced we’d all hit the incredible milestone of 200 million verifiable observations overall. Today, there are 203.4 million verifiable observations - we’re adding more than a million observations a week. Truly amazing!
So, I’m wondering how many identifications are added every week, besides the observer’s original ID (assuming they added one)? Is there a way to figure that out? And how many IDs, besides the orginial one, have been added to iNat overall?
@Pisum, you are such a marvel - thank you so much! One and a half million IDs added by identifiers every week is fantastic. When you consider that some small percent of Verifiable observations will end up as Casual, for whatever reason, and a somewhat larger percent can never be identified to Research Grade, hovering around a 62.5 percent ratio looks pretty good to me.
My mom keeps asking me what the difference between butterfly pea and pigeonwings. I told her if she IDed a bunch of them then the differences will be ingrained in her brain and she won’t forget again. I told her she should work on it today for IdentiFriday.
Fills me with utter despair
but
3 million IDs seems some kind of wonder full!! And if half of those are by the observers - well, that’s encouraging too. We make good progress.
But still not enough, per @DianaStuder’s recommendation for 2.5 identifications for every observation. If we are adding more than a million observations per week, we would need more then two and a half million identifications per week.
On the other hand, three million identifications per week if you count observer IDs is enough, if those observer IDs are correct.
in general, it looks to me like each observation generally needs ~1.25 identifications from others to keep status quo. you could think of that as 0.25 to get an identification on observations that are never identified by the observer (1 out of 4 observations), plus another 1 identification by others on average on each observation. status quo would mean that 62.5% of verifiable observations then reach research grade based on that.
of course, if you want to do better than status quo, you need more identifications – either more from others, or more from the observers.
I am still in India… about 150 pages (~4500 obs) of coarse Araneae remaining for me… but yesterday I got the final push to dive deeper into the Leucauges (of India for now) at last and they got me hooked over night… It’s now only about 1000 needs ID - pretty doable… And that is just one of the many Family or Genus filters I could use in India after I am done with the Araneae
There are also about 3.5 million arachnida worldwide that need ID and over 300.000 that are more coarsly IDed then familiy (which is what often is doable at least and what I also love IDing worldwide) … at least we never get bored I guess
I told her she should work on it today for IdentiFriday.