iNaturalist backlogs and trends?

[colinpurrington]

@matthias55

There is a huge backlog of “unknown” observations, often created by new users, and these observations are not that accessible for iNat taxonomic specialists. I get the sense that this backlog is increasing, though I don’t have data to back that up.

I spend a lot of time IDing these unknowns. For taxa I’m not familiar with, I find myself using the ID suggestions (especially if the photo is good and I think well-suited for computer vision). It would save me a lot of time if iNat would just do it automatically.

Is there a page that shows graphs of different types of backlogs on iNaturalist? E.g., if novice users/IDers are signing up at an accelerating rate relative to those who know how (and want to) ID, that situation would probably affect speed to RG ID and such. It would be interesting to see the trends.

[bouteloua]

Heya, a heads up that I moved this to reply as a linked topic rather than go down a separate rabbit hole in the feature request you commented in.

You can check some of these trends on the iNaturalist Stats page, which is linked to in the main site header under “More”: https://www.inaturalist.org/stats

You can add code like ?start_date=2013-01-01 or another date to the URL and then click Zoom: max, though the page can be very slow to load.

e.g. this one week “Time to ID” graph

(Note that the count of users will include a lot of spam accounts, so the observations and ID trends are more meaningful.)

[charlie]

It looks like the biggest trend is still that in northern hemisphere summer things get more backlogged, and then over northern hemisphere winter people do more IDs and reduce the backlog some. It seems like it’s scaled decently with growth at least per that graph.

[bouteloua]

Here are a few “backlogs”:

• taxon flags (though really all flags)
• observations with coordinates at 0,0 that are erroneously needs ID or research grade
• observations “stuck” at “Life”

[cmcheatle]

@bouteloua

taxon flags (though really all flags)

As I write this, there are 170 pages of unresolved flags that excludes the spam and copyright infringement groupings.

82 pages of the 170 appear to be flags on ‘duplicate’ observations. So 48% of the unresolved flags appear to fall into this group alone. If you then were to include the flags on taxa that centre on unaccepted subspecies in POWO, you’d probably add another 10% to the total.

If we could just get tools and or consensus guidance on what to do with these, we’d be able to significantly reduce the backlog.