Hi everyone, and happy new year!!!
So 2025 has come to an end, and so has a great year of iNatting!
What are your iNat goals and plans for the new year?
I hope to reach fifty thousand IDs, ten thousand observations, and one thousand annotations. I will be getting on here and out there whenever possible, looking for ways to contribute. I think they seem pretty reachable, as I have made just over five thousand obs this year, and around 350 annotations? I started pretty late, since I didn’t feel very comfortable with it until recently and am still trying it out. As for IDs, I didn’t really start IDing until around June-ish, and am going faster and faster as I am getting better. I think I will have a lot more time to ID in the summer, too, without homework from my CO-OPs and some half-days in homeschool for the weather (Plus a trip to Canada to visit my family; hopefully I will see some awesome birds!!!)
I wish you all a wonderful 2026 year iNatting!! 
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I’m hoping to add IDs for 80% of the Australian Loranthaceae observations I haven’t reviewed: something like 10,000 at the rate they are now being added. I plan to annotate them as I go.
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Happy New Year! :)
I’m still a bit doubtful currently, whether it will work out, but I might get my hands on a really good microscope that can do fluorescence, phase contrast, etc, and has an adapter for my camera already. If that works out, I hope I can get some amazing microscopy photos to upload to iNat.
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Thanks for all your help and id skills.
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And if you do, you ought to practice on some springtails. :P
Well, my goal is to also upgrade microscope, so hopefully both of our goals are fulfilled!
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Ooh, I’ll try that, thank you for the tip! Although they may be a bit too large already. I’m planning on getting a good 20x and probably a 10x as well later on and keep the rest as cheap as possible. (I don’t have the money for a full set of high end objectives haha). My primary focus is meiofauna, plankton, and ciliates :D
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I recommend a 7-45x stero microscope for low magnification needs, they typically have a working distance of 10cm if you need to manipulate anything and a 1.5x barlow lens to reduce the working distance to 4cm and increase magnification.
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I just want to do more than last year. It’s a little too cold for me go outside, so I ID’ed today. Off to a good start.
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(1) Spend more time in the field.
(2) Work on some in-person events to help introduce newcomers to iNat. This grows out of my efforts to ID Unknowns — so many newcomers seem to drop off iNat after 20-50 observations, and when you’re IDing, often you get a sense of how they find the platform frustrating, while some fairly simple onboarding might have kept them engaged. Since I have a background in adult education, this is seems like a good fit for me.
(3) Spend more time in the field.
(4) Put more effort into the NE Pollinator Project on iNat, and maybe find another similar project I can commit to. I used to participate in the USA Phenology Network project for Aesculus californica — can no longer make that kind of regular commitment due to demands of my job — but I do miss being part of more structured citizen science projects.
(5) Spend more time in the field.
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I’m making a daily observation challenge. By the moment is just to make a research grade observation every day, but I’m aiming to do 365 different species (But I’m not sure if I will be able to do that during winter months)
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I planned on doing that (as well as an eBird checklist), and then was busy one day, so forgot. Whoops. Ruined already.
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Maybe you could observe two different species in a day and then you would compensate for that missing day and it can be an almost yearly streak 
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No, that’s tarnished now. I’ll just have to try again next year and put an alarm reminder on my phone every 6pm. “GET OUTSIDE AND iNAT”.
My goal for this year is to submit observations for species that I have not yet seen. I start the year with 1639 species. Let’s see if I remember to come back and see how I did.
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I did that in 2021! It was not easy, but I made it! https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/susanne-kasimir/61364-my-daily-beast-2021 But be warned, afterwards you can’t stop anymore, because then you have a one-year-streak. Consequently my streak is running now for five years. I don’t know where you live, but you just want species, so there might be trees, lichens, mushrooms in the winter?! There are even insects on snow :-)
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Madrid! I just saw that you did It in Málaga so I guess It’s posible (I’m going to use the daily beast name you used, sounds pretty dope)
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but daily beast is more complicated, because it’s just animals of course 
I can’t think of a daily species name that sounds equally catchy, though. And you have to make your own list and assign a daily species - hm, you probably could just tag the daily observation. You just have to know which species you already “used”. I usually took the rarest animal with a reasonably good photo. And even then I sometimes had to change the list, when I only found something I had already. So I had to go to that other day and check if there was another species I could use. I also had “joker bugs”. Bugs I knew to be sitting on one species of plant for weeks on end. So, if I didn’t find anything on that day I went to take a photo of one of those bugs.
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