I also regularly go through and add identifications to Unknowns.
I haven’t tried in a while, but does iNaturalist give a warning if someone tries to submit an observation without an ID? If not, it should. And if it already does, then the warning obviously is not doing enough.
(Seaweeds are evil, red and green are plants, but the brown ones are in a separate Kingdom. And they don’t show their ‘taxonomy colours’) But still, there may be a few common and easy ones. Here it would be https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/83549-Ecklonia-maxima
yes - you get a red flashing box … and then we get a coerced ID like A Plant. yay.
Don’t worry, I’m not the only one looking at them! A whole bunch have disappeared from the Unknowns today some time after I got fed up. Which is nice! I haven’t looked to see who might have cleared them up, but whoever it was I’m grateful.
I can’t do anything with the seaweeds - I’ve just left them. And the strange blobs of unidentifiable decayed something.
The website does - I don’t know about the app as I don’t use it. However if there is a warning it is easy to ignore, based on the number of Unknowns.
You always have the best links. I appreciate your posts and updates on keeping track of the quality of your own observations.
I really like this idea. As someone who is no longer in field work, I’m now working as a nurse, I used to be a field biologist in southern Arizona, I feel like I don’t know much but I’m really good at stumbling through things and learning by mistakes.
Edit: I adjusted the sentence to make more sense.
I think one way to prevent “burnout” is to have ID projects at several different taxonomic levels to keep things fresh. I usually have Identify tabs open for Unknowns from my state, all observations from my County, Lepidoptera from my region, and a few genera from the whole world. IDing is supposed to be fun and engaging, so if I start to get frustrated I just bop over to a different project.
As for reciprocation, I think a big challenge is that the more a user knows, the more obscure and difficult-to-identify their observations become. For example, when I was just learning plants, I’d post every random tree, shrub, and flower in the hopes that I’d get help learning them. Now that I’ve learned the “easy” species in my area, I don’t continue posting those, and I’ve moved on to posting a higher percentage of challenging or obscure plants, because I know how to filter out the common stuff. I don’t know how one might visualize this tendency statistically, but I’d be willing to bet that on average, the more someone observes, the more difficult the IDs for their observations become. So thinking in terms of time investment rather than just number of IDs, one ID for an obscure endangered sedge that requires extremely specialized knowledge might be the equivalent of 100 super obvious IDs. I think that consideration is sometimes missed when one starts comparing overall ID numbers. But the more active a user is, the harder it probably becomes for anyone to “reciprocate” IDs for them. When I go to an active identifier’s observations to try to pay them back some IDs, the stuff I could help with is usually already at RG.
that is my excuse for triple posting. I could see each time that the links were clicked by many. Despite being repeated, again, and again.
I like this approach and have started using it myself as I’ve expanded beyond ID’s in my province. I also wonder if we tie ourselves to the goal of completion (or at least near completion) and that chasing this unrealistic goal is a source of burnout/discouragement for IDers. I’d love nothing more than to review all the species X from area Y, but unless those categories are very restrictive, that’s never going to happen.
This is not to say that new IDers aren’t welcome (please come!), but perhaps our goal being completion is something we (including me) need to hold a bit more loosely.
I carve the slabs down to a slice I can manage. Not even getting to African Unknowns - but - I can keep up with African Newbies. With a double goal of IDs are good, and encouraging Newbies is even better. Use the filter for - Account Creation - In the Past Week.
Yeah, there are very few areas where I can say I’m “complete”. For the one moth genus I ID a lot (Acrolophus) I’ve kept up with having them all reviewed (I’ve ID’d 41k of the 68k observations and at least reviewed the rest). And I can tell you when I first got to the end of them it was very… anticlimactic. I don’t think reaching “completion” is really a reasonable goal or even a desirable one. Just ID because you like to ID, and don’t get bogged down in stress about how many pages you have left to go through. The reward is in seeing what other people have observed and honing your ID skills, not finishing a project. There’s no other social media platform where you keep scrolling as fast as possible to get to the “end” of your feed and declare victory over it. Just think of your ID work as a never-ending source of critter pictures to look at. They talk a lot about the “gamification” aspect of iNat- I see it as Minecraft, not Zelda. You don’t “beat the game”, you just keep finding new ways to mess around and pass the time and get enjoyment out of it. If I ever find myself slogging through IDs joylessly for the sake of being done, I figure it’s time to find something else to do. As they say with gambling, “when the fun stops, stop”.
I’ve come to find the ID process discouraging. Just too many bad Unknowns, blurry and uncropped, for my tired old eyes to try to decipher. If there’s one change in iNat I’d wish for, it’s that an observer would not be able to point their phone at something, take a shot, and immediately upload it without first having to review and perhaps edit their pic to see if it’s worth submitting. I don’t want to see your attempt at photo’ing something, I want to see the best photo(s) you were able to get. Would it slow down the process of iNat submissions? Yes, and that would be a good thing.
I target friends, acquaintances, colleagues, anyone I think has taxonomic expertise /skills to lend here on iNaturalist, but honestly, the biggest barrier they mention is usually this… the initial discouragement that comes from first flip through a little too much unidentifiable content. Or even worse, you’ll poison their well sooner if their taxon of interest is already rife with overconfident IDs. They’ll look at iNaturalist data differently from then on.
In many ways the point of iNaturalist is to involve folks who would say, not know any better to upload what’s identifiable or what’s ‘valuable,’ so I don’t really fault any observation, no matter how atrocious. But I also cannot fault anyone who recognize those type of observations as pretty prohibitive to timely (or accurate) data curation.
Identifiers more often take perspectives related to improving data accuracy/precision, but observer intentions are so multifarious, they may be totally ambivalent to whether their observation is going to please any one else.
One of the many strength-weakness balances of iNaturalist. it may not be for everyone… but for those it does work for, boy it seems to work quite well! Really, I think we’re in a great position to be at the stage of “we have too much data, all hands on deck!” I believe I started iNat around 18 million observations (ca.2017), and I think it is now some 200 million? I forget, but we are dealing with immense data (some tended, some untended). Very proud of where iNaturalist is in 2025. Unfathomable information for species ranges has been accumulated, some, as you’ve all identified, literally just awaiting the careful (two) IDs for recognition.
Agreed. I’ve felt pushed to reduce my identification efforts for a few months now. As nice as it would be to get more identifers. I’m not actually sure I can reccomend becoming an identifier for iNaturalist, atleast for certain taxa groups. There’s a number of different issues, certain frustrations, and stress that can come with being an identifier. Sometimes I wonder if I’m stuck in a sunk cost fallacy. I’ve spent so much time volunteering work on Chironomidae on INaturalist, I feel I can’t take a break or a few hundred misidentifications will pile up.
I’m not sure what the best path forward is. I just know iNaturalist should invest more into improving the identification process for identifiers. Help reduce some of the burdens identifiers experience.
I admire this thought process.
Thank you for this perspective, data is powerful and this is something to celebrate. Even if some data is untended. The positivity is welcomed.
It’s hard for people to reciprocate your hard work, when you’ve only made 78 observations this year. Although you certainly are setting an example with your I/O ratio of 318:1!
But, seriously, I think you could use a break from all of your identifications. Get outside and find some more worth observing!
This is true, but it also works the other way. As I said earlier,
How long is someone – as David put it – “not even at the level of enthusiastic beginner”? He was referring to the short-termers who post a few and then go dormant. When I see users with observation numbers in the three and four digits – there are more of those than the 130 identifiers that Diana referred to.
What I’m trying to say is that, as someone’s observations start to skew harder-to-identify the longer they are here, isn’t it reasonable to expect that their identifications would show a similar trend?
I don’t want to discourage people identifying the obvious ones - if there weren’t the 2-3 people who immediately jump on every observation I submit of Common Snapping Turtle or Common Milkweed then the site would be worse off. On the other hand, I have no doubts about those IDs and someone will always be able to confirm them later. I wish a handful of those people would instead spend some time learning aquatic plant genera or ladybug larvae or something which takes just the next level of thinking and research. Something for which there are resources available and the taxa are identifiable from images, but not everyone is interested or aware and can recognize the species on sight.
This has gotten better though. I remember years ago when there were indefinite pages of easy-to-ID adult Asian Lady Beetle and 7-spotted Lady Beetle observations. Now all but the most recent or challenging observations of those species are RG. In part we just need to expand the range of species which people feel they can accessibly identify.
As a new user dipping my toes into identifying a select few insect and arachnid groups, one thing that I would find incredibly helpful on the path to learning is for the species’ pages to link to up-to-date sources for identifications. I know top identifiers frequently get their information from published sources (including what they’ve published themselves), so why not a place for them to share those sources right on the species’ page? I’ve seen some people reference sources in comments, or put sources on their profiles, and those have been immensely helpful.
Good idea. I believe the iNaturalist “species pages” are pulled in from Wikipedia. An article full of specific identification tips may not always be welcome in Wikipedia articles, as that is not really the focus there. I try to post comments about difficult ID’s in captions and comments on my observations. (Sometimes I’m still wrong, of course!) Many people will post short articles on identification as journal posts. That is probably the best solution internal to iNaturalist.
If you are interested in North American invertebrates, many BugGuide pages have identification tips. There are also some articles on identification in the articles section on the BugGuide forums.
inat having an info page for all species would likely make more users inclined to help identify. Otherwise, identification info is extremely hard to find.
I agree that more tools for helping identifiers manage their workflows, access resources, and collaborate are sorely needed. Some people have noted in the past that site development has sometimes seemed to give priority to the observing side of things at the expense of identifier needs; maybe now that the new app has been released this will free up some of the developer capacity and we will see other issues being tackled.
But I think an important part of the equation is also helping and encouraging users to become better observers. I feel rather like a broken record at this point, but iNat urgently needs a plan for user onboarding. I think a large portion of observers would probably make an effort to make better observations if they knew from the outset that this was important (i.e., that iNat is not just an app where you take a photo of something and get an ID, but rather observations are data used in biodiversity research) and had some idea about how to do so. There is no inherent reason why new users would join iNat automatically knowing these things. Unless one already has some formal experience with nature observation, most people have likely never thought much about how we know what something is or what sort of documentation is needed so that others can identify what we saw. In most cases, there is going to be a learning process – how to be a good observer. There is no reason why this learning process has to be a process of trial and error, nor is it sustainable to rely on the volunteer efforts of other users to help new users understand how iNat works or fix their mistakes.
Agreed. I posted this proposal a while ago: Create an “identification center” with guides, curated subcategories, events, and more and I continue to believe that creating a dedicated section for training, support, and community for identifiers would increase the number of identifiers of all levels many times over. The information is there, the willingness of people to help with this is there, the interest in becoming an identifier is easily triggered in many observers… we just need to give all of this a good structure.