After posting a goal like that, I had to check your 2024 Year in Review: 92,779 Identifications. Already outstanding, and you want to triple that!?
Oh, wait, you haven’t regenerated your stats since November 26. Maybe you had a busy December. 
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Oh! I meant a total of 300,000 IDs since I started using iNat, not just in 2025!
I mean, I’m crazy, but not that crazy. (I hope)
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Oh, so you only need 35,000 more. Piece of cake!
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That’s fewer than 100 a day! Every day of the year! No problem!
(I really am crazy, aren’t I?)
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Well, I can join you on that bench then with my all-yearly-aim of 40 k IDs 
I am still trying to figure out what my focus this year will be. I really enjoyed my deep dive into asian spiders last year and learned so much. It was also nice to see that my help was/is really needed there, with so many IDs and not enough IDers.
However, I do like to learn more and I feel the area I know least about is the area below the Wallace line and I would love to change that. I am currently testing the waters in Australia, but actually I think New Zealand might be a better start, as I know at least two of the top ten spider IDers in NZ are not IDing anymore, so there might actually be an IDer gap. Let’s see… I will for sure stay active in Asia as well.
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I had fun with placeholder text during Great Southern Bioblitz - when I included New Zealand.
Almost 600 Pre-Maverick spiders in New Zealand ?
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Looks like a good place to start 
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I always try to annotate whether it is flowering or fruiting or what color the leaves are. It helps I think in knowing whether this is the normal time when that plant flowers or if that year it was unseasonably warm finding that plant was flowering out of season can be helpful for research I’m sure. If for some reason we notice a dip in a certain species that used it’s pollen, for example, we could tie it to well it flowered too soon due to an early spring or too hot of a summer, etc. That’s how I see it.
Edited to add that adding annotations on my android is very easy so it’s not hard to do. But also when I’m identifying on the website, using a computer, it’s also super easy and quick.
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I had aimed for 100k IDs this year, extrapolated from the IDing I did in 2023. Ended up just shy of 125k ids for 2024. Plan is to aim for another 100k in 2025.
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125K IDs in one year is extraordinary! Thank you!
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And it’s Friday again! As I sit here in frigid New England, I realize how important it is to me to know that I’m not pushing back against the avalanche of Needs ID observations all by myself. I am not alone at all - and thanks to everyone who helps in this endeavor! - but that’s hard to remember when I’m sitting by myself, so I thought that probably other people feel the same way I do and could use a little digital company in our task. So, tell me (us), what are you up to these days for IDing?
Currently, I’m working on moving plant observations in my region from genus to species, where I can. I also look at Unknown observations that were uploaded a week ago in my region and move them to the best ID I can (even if that’s only Fungi). Ditto for mammals - somehow I feel that if someone posts a photo of an Eastern Gray Squirrel, they should get quick feedback. (But not tracks - I know my limits.)
I also just realized that not all observers are looking for someone else to confirm their IDs. Some very prolific and competent observers don’t always make it easy for identifiers - maybe they are just looking to make a record for themselves of what they saw on a trip? So, I’ve stopped worrying about IDing every single observation of species I know well. Sure, I could usually push such observations back to genus, but eh, what does it hurt, really, to leave something at an unconfirmed species, when I can’t be quite sure it’s that species?
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Right now, I’m on a trip with my wife and dog. The best thing about this morning’s brief field trip is that goose shit smells not unpleasantly like cut grass; back at the hotel, dog is now very clean. As for identifying, in the evening I look through recent uploads, mostly Oregon, plus some Needs ID from the same month/day but a few years ago. It’s fun to move some “stuck” observations forward. Once we get home, I’ll probably do nothing but ID for a couple days, to recover.
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Ha, you made me laugh about your dog! It reminds me of a time decades ago, when my ex-husband and I took our golden retriever on a winter trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Our dog very kindly rolled in a long-dead skunk just before we all had to get in the car to go home.
I, too, look through the current Needs ID pile for my region almost every day, but I hadn’t thought about going back to the same day a few years ago. Good idea!
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My most recent goal has been to get as many things out of kingdom Plantae as possible in my region. Sometimes I can only refine down to phylum or class, but I’m quite frankly amazed at how many perfectly IDable observations there are that have been sitting at Plants, even for 8+ years. There are observations with multiple pictures, flowers, fruits, that somehow just got lost.
As I see it, the only things that should “really” be in kingdom Plantae are observations where one can’t determine whether something is a vascular plant or a non-vascular plant (algae, mosses, hornworts, etc.). If it’s over a few centimeters tall and isn’t in the ocean, get that observation into Tracheophyta at the very least!
Is this a good use of my time? I don’t know, but I actually find going through the broad-level observations both enjoyable and extremely helpful for improving my IDing skills. Plus, there’s more of a treasure-hunt quality to it, compared to reviewing an entire species or genus for my region. I’ve come across some relatively uncommon plants this way, as well as some cool galls and other interesting things.
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I started there, and kept going down the levels.
Now picking thru Families. Where the learning curve is much slower and more painful (but still, if it is Family then someone will visit and move it on, in years to come?)
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Recently I picked up again Convolvulaceae from Europe & North Africa and I’m trying to get as much of the backlog as I can before spring. Other prolific IDers were earlier than me it seems, so I do a lot of agreeing IDs, but I stumbled onto a few gems like this one for example : https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/214773886 Still 8000 obs to check that were posted since may 2024…
When I’m bored I do Plantae to class from Europe+North Africa or Europe+North Africa+Asia. It’s indeed a good way to improve ID skills as @jonsense said and it’s very rewarding, even though the bin is so big !
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A while ago I finally got through reviewing all the Needs ID plants in Vermont. That, of course, involved lots of clicking of “reviewed” and moving on, especially for all of the observations of bare twigs, old seed heads, brown leaves, and dead plants in the winter months. And all the blurry photos of green things. Plus of course the many, many taxa of which I have absolutely no knowledge, which far outnumber the ones I do.
My reward for going through them all, is that now I can easily keep up with new postings daily - at least until spring, when they will of course greatly increase in numbers again.
Now I am plodding my way through plants in MA and NH, but only for May - Sept. I always filter for a month at a time - I find that less daunting.
Sometimes, hoping it will be fun, I give “unknowns” a try, but I always quickly become aggravated, and decide that it is actually not fun - for me. But thanks to everyone with more patience, who keep putting things into “plants” and “dicots,” etc. where I can find them.
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Right now I slowed down a bit on IDing as I am currently stuck between suitcases and chaos as we just moved into our new home near Salzburg/Austria after a month of homeless family visits… I just have some brief moments like now, when dogs have been walked and Baby sleeps and I have gone through all the online second hand furniture markets and such…
But when I do a bit of IDing I am going through New Zealand spiders trying to get a better understanding of the fauna there… starting to feel kinda comfortable with Orbweavers by now… down under will be my yearly project.
When I do not feel like putting in toooo much thought but just want to relax, I go back to Japan, Taiwan, India to ID spiders there or do a worldwide “Araneae to Family/genus” trip
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This is brilliant! I’m totally doing this. #Identifriday forever!
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