I typically try to get a combo of leaf, zoomed out shot, and any flowers/ buds if I see any (something like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/229440194) . Any way I can improve this?
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as a general approach if you have the time, and you have no clue what family/genus you’re looking at and/or don’t know the most important diagnostic character(s) for that specific plant, I generally recommend up to 10 key shots to hedge your bets:
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The whole plant.
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The base of the plant.
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The bark.
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An entire branch or branchlet.
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A close-up of a branchlet or stem.
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Upper side of leaves.
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Underside of leaves.
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Flowers from above.
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Flowers from beneath.
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Fruits (and seeds if you can).
But once you start to learn plants, you’ll learn which features are most important for particular taxa and won’t need to take all of these every single time
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sounds good, thank you!
My goal this year was to reach 2000 species. I accomplished my goal much earlier than I had planned, now I’ll try to reach 2500 by the end of 2025. Currently, in 2024, I have 1192 observations and 758 species, of which 299 are new species.
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I finally uploaded my 10.000th observation… fittingly it is a lifer for me, so it also helps me on my hopefully soon to reach next milestone of 3.000 species
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I finally reached 1000 identifications for others (out of 17952 total identifications) - but those 1000 certainly were the hardest since identifying a plant from a single blurry picture is much harder than identifying my own plants!
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A major achievement!
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That is an enormous amount of work - thank you for your commitment!
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Woo hoo! I appreciate your ID’s.
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Just hit 6,000 observations
Recently I’ve been working a lot on adding my pre-iNat backlog. I’m going to try to finish posting 2012-2016 by the end of this year. I keep track of what I’ve posted in this spreadsheet. The text is a reminder of what I have left to do for those months. Green is for completed months, Yellow is partially done, and Red is haven’t started yet. Gray means I didn’t take any photos that month that could be made into observations. The column with 1-9 and ABC is how my camera indicates the month in the file name.
GBBC is for Great Backyard Bird Count (at Lake Livingston State Park)
Angelina is for Angelina National Forest
Onalaska is a city in Texas
Watson/Wat is for Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve
Sabine is for Sabine Woods Bird Sanctuary
Waterwood is a wildflower spot in San Jacinto Co (near Waterwood subdivision)
farm is a wildflower spot on Hwy 190 in San Jacinto Co
Burden is for Burden Museum & Gardens (it also has wilderness areas with trails)
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5k exactly… all animals, almost* all in my Trentino, north Italy (*61/79 in Südtirol and the other 18/79 in border areas with other regions of Italy)
Thanks to all the Identifiers! and sorry if I don’t.
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I don’t know (again) if this is a milestone or a confession, but I now have over 100 observations of Plains Forktails (Ischnura damula). This makes me the top observer for the species in the state of Colorado—and on the site in general.
Hi, my name is Becca, and I have an inordinate fondness for flying neon matchsticks…
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I’ve found that even with multiple good pictures I sometimes struggle with observations of species that I would recognize in the field. All the intangible clues that we use when making sense of a particular encounter (size, the way it moves and the sounds it makes, the particular location and environment, etc.) simply don’t translate completely into photos.
This is one reason why I think it is useful for observers to also provide IDs, at least occasionally, at whatever level they feel comfortable. Trying to ID observations oneself forces one to look at what the images actually show and think about what is needed to determine what it is.
I know that when I started using iNat I wasn’t really aware of how many details were needed to ID even many common weeds, and I don’t think I fully realized the difference between what I saw and what was captured in my cell phone photos. In part, it was IDing and trying to make sense of distant blurry photos by other users that led me to strive to improve my own photos.
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Missed it by one observation, dang
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I experienced an excellent milestone last week.
While cycling close to home a Vespula vulgaris flew into my shirt and stung me around my collarbone. It was not pleasant. I found it dead at home in the bathroom after changing clothes.
(I can’t remember ever being stung by a wasp. Other things, oh yes.)
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6 months old today!
The milestone I’m most pleased with is just passing 550 species. Every increase in this brings a lot of pleasure and new knowledge.
Annotations is something I was slow to pick up on and I’m working my way through my older observations and also trying to add as I go along now (and also on ID’s).
Another milestone - was making a daily journal everyday (almost!) for the month of June. Something I had not done before in any format.
Lastly I would just like to give thanks to all the wonderful people in the above posts who have made this such a great community to be involved with.
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I have 33k+ Liverwort (Marchantiophyta) IDs which is currently the highest number on the website :)
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First time I was ever stung by a wasp was when I was a kid when a Polistes metricus flew up the back of my shirt. I thought it was a mosquito so I swatted at it and it stung my back and my hand. It still have a deep-seated hatred of that particular species of paper wasp which seems to really like making nests in doorways. They will leave the nest to investigate you or follow you into the house and it always freaks me out. Occasionally I will see that one of the smaller striped paper wasps has built a nest next to a place that I walk frequently. They always stay on the nest, except for one time recently when the nest was on some tall vegetation I was walking through, meaning I likely actually moved the nest (that one stung me).
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It was never meant to last…
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