All the discussions about the need for identifiers made me think again where I could do my part.
I guess my main stumbling block in doing IDs is that my best area of knowledge (European orchids) is already filled with many competent and active identifiers, meaning that it doesn’t seem to need my further input (the only things left at needs ID are very fresh observations or the really tricky ones I don’t feel confident about).
Quite some time ago, I was puttering around in the unknowns, but the discussions whether it makes sense to put these unknowns into the large bins I know about (Plantae…dicots…Animalia…) or whether it would be better to leave them in the unknown bin for someone with better knowledge than me that can put them in narrower bins (families or groups) made me shy away from the unknown again.
Real life and other hobbies (generating those thousand observations…) unfortunately mean that I don’t have much remaining time to get involved in learning another taxon more deeply to contribute there, but I was wondering if there were some “low-hanging ID fruits” that I could contribute to.
What are your thoughts and suggestions? Makes it sense to tackle the unknowns again? Moving plantae to dicots and monocots (about my level of competence with plants outside orchids…)?
Do you know any easy ID tasks where low-knowledge level people like me could contribute?
I’ve found lots to do IDing common weeds near me (New England in the USA). If any of the common plants around you are easy to identify, you could start working on them. I also look at the genus level for these species, not just the species level, because often observers who are unsure will leave an observation at, say, Cichorium instead of Chicory. Since Chicory is the only representative of its genus in my region (and it’s very common here), I can easily move an observation from genus to species.
It’s also useful to look through Plants and Unknowns for cultivated plants, particular at the beginning and end of the school year and during the annual City Nature Challenge. If you can add a finer ID, great, but even just IDing something as Dicot and Cultivated will help reduce the Needs ID pile.
Lastly, you can add annotations. It’s usually easy to tell if a plant is in flower and fruit and you can mark the observations accordingly. That can be very useful for researchers!
With over 20 thousand observations I would imagine you have at least some general ability to recognize common local organisms and put them into broad categories, even if this is intuitive rather than based on formal knowledge.
The people insisting that anything above family is useless for plants are not in Europe. For European unknowns, feel free to do what you are comfortable with. A more specific ID will generally be more useful than a broad one, but plenty of observations also end up at high levels due to disagreements, so there are people who look at these.
For arthropods: If it has an exoskeleton and wings you can call it Pterygota (most of the time insects will also be Pterygota even if they do not (currently) have wings, but there are a few exceptions). If it has eight legs (make sure all eight are legs and not antennae), Arachnida. A forum search should turn up some other threads with tips for broad sorting of other groups (fungi, plant families).
It is OK to use the computer suggestions to get an idea of what something could be. Please don’t just uncritically select the first suggestion, but if you check the suggestions and determine that, say, they are all in the same family, an ID for the family is generally going to be pretty safe. (When the CV gives wildly different suggestions, this is probably where you want to be more careful.) You should not feel like you need to identify everything – it is fine to skip observations and focus on the ones where you think you can contribute something. I like the option to sort randomly in the Identify module, as this ensures a mix of new and older observations.
I agree that annotating is another good way to help; note that you will probably want to use the Identify module on the website for adding annotations, not one of the apps.
Final note: make sure to regularly check your notifications in case you need to withdraw a wrong ID – obviously this is important as an observer, too, but I feel like it is particularly important for IDers because your IDs affect other people’s observations.
You may be able to find more ID-able orchid observations if you change your search url from taxon_id= to ident_taxon_id= (for your taxon of interest). That will give you all records where at least one IDer has suggested that taxon (or its descendants).
It’s helpful for finding observations that could potentially be of the taxon you know that get lost in higher taxa (angiospermae, magnoliopsida, liliopsida) because of ID disagreement, without having to trawl through every record in those huge, broad-level taxa. Works especially well if you set your ‘lowest rank’ filter one level higher than the taxon that you’re searching.
Please share your orchid knowledge to a wider location.
If you can either help retrieve orchids from a broader ID (plants, angiosperms, monocots …) which is daunting.
Or perhaps sort obs at - it’s an orchid! - into finer IDs which may then reach the right specialist. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?taxon_id=47217&place_id=97392&lrank=family
If you follow the advice to add ident_taxon my link jumps from 600 to 900. (Should keep you busy for a while) Tweak the URLs till you find something that works for your skills and interest.
PS tempting! Lots of - no, that is NOT an orchid, and I can point the obs in a better direction.
I wonder if orchids in Europe are as well covered as you suggest. I have orchid observations in Europe that have not been confirmed by a second identifier for over a year. As Diana suggests, maybe expand the area you are looking at? Of course some will be in complex genera and difficult to confirm to species, but others may be quite identifiable.
North Africa, the Middle East, and temperate Asia will have a lot of overlap at least in genera, and might also do with some help.
How about searching for plants (or maybe everything) in your location (country? Europe as a whole?). New things are always coming in so there are always new things to ID.
In the wake of the Brown Booby split, I cleaned up a circle centered on the Caribbean – and while I was at it, verified some Masked Boobies. Oh, and corrected a Tropicbird misidentified as a Masked Booby. I must say, I was thankful for observers who had opted out of taxon changes – their original Brown Booby IDs still stood.
I’ve been working on that off and on. One of the things that stops me a bit is that P. acinosa has apparently been showing up in the wild in the upper Midwest of the US. I’ve never seen that species and don’t have any references that distinguish between acinosa and americana. I haven’t looked that hard at the photos on iNat, but at first glance, the two species don’t look easy to tell apart (ETA: without flowers or fruit). So I’m a little leery of making the assumption that every Phytolacca outside the American southwest is americana.
The Flora of the Southeastern United States now lists four species in genus Phytolacca. However, two are “rare waifs” and the remaining one (P. rigida) is treated as a variety on iNat. If that ever gets split out, it’s going to be another “easy” plant ID made more difficult by splitting, but so far that hasn’t happened yet.