Rupert Clayton is in the throes of taxonomy curation for Iridaceae.
Some links here if you would like to choose a local slice to help? About 8K worldwide.
https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/106416-updates-on-higher-iridaceae-taxonomy
Starting at the discussion on the flag
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/732933
PS having spent the day cross-eyed over Southern African irids … reassuring that we are … at 62% RG. I am trapped in the other third.
You have my sympathies - been there, done that. But, alas, I must refuse your kind offer of where to look, as comrades and I are gearing up to spend next weekend tackling the 1.9 million Needs Id plant observations in the northeastern US. If we put even a 1% dent in that alarming number, I shall count that as a very large victory indeed.
But you remind me that all of us, identifiers and observers and curators and the illustrious iNat staff, just keep achieving one small victory after another here on iNat (and elsewhere, too, I suspect). @Pisum really cheered me up some time ago when they posted an analysis saying that the percent of all iNat observations that are RG has stayed right around 64% for years now (I hope I’m not mis-stating that). In other words, for all our individual despair over never, ever getting to the bottom of our chosen slice of Needs ID observations, collectively we have achieved an astonishing victory in biodiversity knowledge, one tiny Creeping Jenny and Poaceae photo at a time.
as of today 2025-02-15, based on what i see in https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_obs_counts_by_iconic_taxa, it looks like RG to Verifiable is 63.2% – so still right in the general neighborhood of where’s it’s been:
| Iconic Taxon | Verifiable | R Grade | % RG of V | Needs ID | % NID of V | All | Diff All-V | % V of All | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mammals |  |
4,794,356 | 4,042,854 | 84.3 | 751,502 | 15.7 | 5,675,240 | 880,884 | 84.5 |
| Birds |  |
31,487,587 | 29,684,149 | 94.3 | 1,803,438 | 5.7 | 33,903,849 | 2,416,262 | 92.9 |
| Reptiles |  |
4,802,628 | 4,412,716 | 91.9 | 389,912 | 8.1 | 5,097,937 | 295,309 | 94.2 |
| Amphibians |  |
3,001,602 | 2,488,888 | 82.9 | 512,714 | 17.1 | 3,142,941 | 141,339 | 95.5 |
| Ray-Finned Fish |  |
2,516,219 | 2,030,300 | 80.7 | 485,919 | 19.3 | 2,710,924 | 194,705 | 92.8 |
| Mollusks |  |
3,599,592 | 2,209,500 | 61.4 | 1,390,092 | 38.6 | 3,694,475 | 94,883 | 97.4 |
| Insects |  |
59,980,748 | 34,114,561 | 56.9 | 25,866,187 | 43.1 | 61,535,208 | 1,554,460 | 97.5 |
| Arachnids |  |
6,646,931 | 2,793,342 | 42.0 | 3,853,589 | 58.0 | 6,828,643 | 181,712 | 97.3 |
| Other Animals |  |
4,349,828 | 2,136,214 | 49.1 | 2,213,614 | 50.9 | 4,523,399 | 173,571 | 96.2 |
| Plants |  |
90,422,914 | 55,185,624 | 61.0 | 35,237,290 | 39.0 | 103,780,980 | 13,358,066 | 87.1 |
| Fungi |  |
14,437,411 | 4,209,744 | 29.2 | 10,227,667 | 70.8 | 14,756,545 | 319,134 | 97.8 |
| Chromista | 314,510 | 140,014 | 44.5 | 174,496 | 55.5 | 322,194 | 7,684 | 97.6 | |
| Protozoa | 359,972 | 113,402 | 31.5 | 246,570 | 68.5 | 366,697 | 6,725 | 98.2 | |
| Unknown | 517,862 | 31,046 | 6.0 | 486,816 | 94.0 | 5,391,853 | 4,873,991 | 9.6 | |
| All |  |
227,232,160 | 143,592,354 | 63.2 | 83,639,806 | 36.8 | 251,730,885 | 24,498,725 | 90.3 |
So, having (for the time being) finished Cuba, I stepped back and set out to learn the Cuban species of Calisto. A lot have been described since my field guide was published in the mid-70s; that publication only recognized one, C herophile. After reading several papers, including a key (of course there had to be more described after the key was published), and flipping through the Butterflies of Cuba website, I felt ready for a new challenge:
Go back through Calisto observations in Cuba and try to get them to species or RG, as the case may be. It led to my adding another species to iNat, Calisto disjunctus. I may add C. torrei, too, but I don’t feel confident to add that ID to the observation in question.
From Pisum’s table, It looks like it’s time to nudge some bird identifiers to broaden their scope.
Especially since it seems that bird observations are the usually the ones with 5+ agreeing observations.
But seeing these statistics reminds me that it’s not all lost and that progress is always being made.
Would be nice to see the green stuff broken down to broad categories. As iNat does for animals.
61% for plants vs ? % for animals
Moss, fern, conifer, dicot, monocot
And ‘other plants’ ?
There will probably always be some percentage of observations of any taxon that are going to be difficult or impossible to ID. As long as no one is comfortable providing the coup de grâce by declaring that the ID cannot be improved, these observations will continue to be “needs ID” indefinitely. 5.7% or thereabouts doesn’t seem unreasonably high for this, even given the astonishing ability of the birder community to confidently put a species ID on a handful of blurry pixels.
Of my bird observations that are not RG or took a very long time to become so, they are mostly audio files plus some of trickier local species to ID from photos (Larus, Certhia, Poecile; I think there is an observation of an empty nest as well) – i.e., observations that require more than the usual skill to ID.
I think of birding as the gateway drug to being a naturalist. Birds are usually beautiful, obvious, and easy to identify, plus there are many, many resources for identifying them, at least in many parts of the world. But after a while, at least for me, I got a little bored seeing the same birds week after week, and I got tired of driving hours to go see some wandering little brown sparrow thousands of miles from its native range. I’m still thrilled when I see a pair of Bald Eagles follow each other up the river in my town and I’m even more thrilled a Song Sparrow showed up at my feeder a week ago, because that is the first sign of spring for me (don’t disillusion me on that!).
I rarely make observations of birds for iNat (I don’t have, or even want, that kind of camera) and I leave IDing birds to those who are passionate about them. If an identifier wants to spend their iNat years IDing only birds, more power to them. And if they get bored with that, well, there are plenty of beautiful, obvious, easily identified plants and fungi and insects waiting for someone to love them, too.
I disagree. It’s a medicine!
Both?
Okay, I’m asking for some help here. Anyone else know about Caribbean butterflies? Calisto sybilla, endemic to the Bahamas, supposedly has zero observations on iNaturalist, but I believe that there are actually three, possibly six, misidentified as the Cuban species Calisto herophile. Observations · iNaturalist
Sorry, I wish I could help, but I know absolutely nothing about Caribbean butterflies. Are there identifiers on the leader boards you could ask for help?
Love these kinds of breakdown @pisum… Thanks!
I am at thr moment not in a mindset of diving deep into species ID, so I stick with the things I already know at the moment, meaning I just do stuck at Araneae worldwide in random order for a while… not that I would soon get bored with that…
That has been my project ever since this reply was posted. I encourage others to join in if you understand the taxonomic framework of birds. No need to filter by location for orders or even some families – Charadriidae look like Charadriidae everywhere in the world.
What amazes me is how many people know enough about birds to know when something isn’t the right species, but don’t know what a passerine is! I find so many that were knocked back from species-level to “Birds” when they are unmistakably passerines. Or even stranger, when they comment suggesting possible species, all of which are passerines, but don’t add “Passeriformes.”
Can someone find the thread with the project for ID tips?
Presume that option is restricted to Curators.
But someone with a useful ID info journal post - could ask to have theirs added?
Does that work?
Why is this odd? Being able to recognize familiar birds – and even intuitively recognizing family resemblances – does not necessarily mean that one knows anything about taxonomic hierarchies. Selecting the lowest common taxa is only simple if one is comfortable with navigating taxonomic trees and has a sense for how they are arranged.
And some people may just add a disagree of “birds” for simplicity, or because they are absolutely certain it is this even if they are less certain about lower taxonomic levels, knowing that an ID of “birds” will still allow the observation to be seen by relevant IDers. They may not realize that they have potentially created an ancestor disagreement.
It’s usually easy to ID passerines as such, but how much does it help? Do identifiers search on passerines? (I do mark them as such when I find them and can’t ID them further, but I’m not sure if it helps.)
Do you mean this one? https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/proposal-for-a-new-filter-option-the-id-tips-button/61624/29
I think it would be better for people to ID as bird than try to get people to ID as passerines. I worry about people IDing small birds as passerines that are not passerines. For example: doves, hummingbirds, cuckoos
That misidentification would happen, of course, but people checking passerines would correct it.