Thank you for your encouragement. Today I have hardly been able to look outside on a lovely day in south of England ~ too much admin. to get through following a bereavement.
Please accept my sympathies. I wish you lovely days to come.
Iām so sorry for your loss. As you grieve, I hope that you are able to find ways to find joy in nature, no matter how small.
Thank you for doing the difficult work of caregiving and simultaneously giving of yourself to ID for others while unable to make as many observations yourself. I hope that nature will be a solace for you as you do the difficult work of grieving your heartbreaking loss.
Your comments are much appreciated here, for sure 
It took me 4 years. It is not a race.
Sincere condolances!
I am definitely more a recorder than an IDāer. I do get to go to some interesting places that are under recorded so it makes it more interesting for me to be able to add records and taxa that are not much known on iNat. As far as identifications are concerned I try and restrict them to my expertise, which is tropical African Flora and I only add IDās where I feel it is needed or useful. I am generally not one for adding IDs where already enough IDs by other trusted experts are present or adding IDs to just any taxon I am familiar with, hence my fairly limited number of IDs. This is just my preferred way of doing things. No judgement there. Everyone should do what and how one wants to do it. That is one of the many beauties of iNat.
Greetings Bart
I am a much more casual user than most of you here it seems; 135 obs, 249 IDs. Very small fry, but still more IDs than obs! I get the urge to ID stuff less frequently than I get the urge to post an observation, but when I do get the IDing whim itās much easier to do a burst so the numbers can rack up faster. (Most of my IDs are moving things out of unknown to broad categories, except for local plants which I might be more familiar with)
Green stuff is the bulk of iNat obs, and every identifier is welcome. Thank you. With insects waiting in the second queue.
As for the IDās, Iām proud to let yāall know Iāll tick the option 100.000+ soon!
Iām mostly an IDer, but Iām also trying to observe something every day, in order to keep my 400 day streak!
I donāt usually add annotations to other peopleās obsā¦ idk, but I add annotations to all of my obs if I can.
I feel itās important to GIVE BACK and to support the iNat community by providing confident IDs and annotations. I enjoy making IDās and adding annotations so that observations can further help researchers and scientists when they use the various search engines on iNat. One new iNat friend and neighbor recently explained something that resonated with me. He said when publishing research papers, itās important and adds credibility to a paper or study when peer-reviewed. He felt that adding IDās and annotations is like performing that āpeer reviewāā to give more credibility. I agree. Plus, even though I knew a LOT about my local ecosystems and habitats and Nature in my area, participating in providing IDs and annotations really expanded my personal knowledge about the species I knew little or nothing about and where they exist in my area. In addition, even thought I am only 61, I use iNat as my ābrain gameā instead of crossword puzzles or online games (I do not like those). Going through observations to ID and add annotations keeps my brain engaged and active. As an iNaturalist Abassador, I also feel it is part of my role to suggest ways for observers to take more quality photos of subjects to help in the rest of us making firm confident IDs. iNat is only as good as the quality of photos and confirmed IDs and annotations. I frequently look at my numbers just for fun, and I feel really good about giving back to the iNat community by adding IDs and annotations. Here are my stats as of March 24, 2026 (and I have some 400+ photos to still upload from a hike last Friday): 62147 obs, 80408 IDs, 19452 annotations. I joined iNat in 2017 during a California Naturalist course.
Thanks for this poll! I much prefer making IDs, I find it quite engaging. So much so that every couple of weeks when I peruse the topics and discussions in the iNat Community Forum Summary email (which are often quite interesting), after awhile of reading I start to think āwhat am I doing spending all this time on the forum when I could be doing more IDs?ā ;-)
Hehe, told ya guys! Now I have to change my vote 
Iām a little late in seeing this, but me! Iām currently sitting at 12,846 observations, 92,980 identifications, and 34,384 annotations.
Annotating is nice for when I want to pay slightly more attention to the show Iām āwatchingā than I otherwise would if I were identifying, and it gives me an excuse to look at observations of taxa I canāt identify (particularly lepidoptera).
This is a good point if youāre reading this thread, and youāre thinking about increasing your number of annotations, but you havenāt read through the āHow you can helpā annotation threads. Especially if you lack confidence in your ID skills.
- Can you tell a butterfly from a caterpillar?
- Can you tell if a plant is flowering or not?
If you can, then you can add useful annotations! You will also learn through this process, as you will get notified when a refining ID is made on the observation.
I better work on my photo backlog so I can reach triple 10K. Iām getting close to 7,500 observations currently.