iNaturalist’s earthworms desperately need identification and curation. I’m sure there are other iNat users who have also dedicated themselves to identifying some group that is frequently misidentified and I would like to know what you’ve done to improve these situations. Trying to review ~150k observations essentially on my own is a lot of work and I do wonder if I am wasting my time on this task.
If you aren’t familiar with what’s going on with oligochaetes, here is an explanation of the issue: Earthworms (Crassiclitellata + Moniligastrida) are usually very difficult or impossible to identify precisely from photos of live animals, and few iNaturalist observers or identifiers are aware of how to identify earthworms. Regardless, many earthworm observations have been wrongly identified to species, and when untrained identifiers allow misidentified or unidentifiable observations to reach Research Grade, these incorrect IDs train the Computer Vision to suggest more misidentifications. The most egregious example is probably *Lumbricus terrestris*, which the CV suggests for nearly all oligochaetes, even those that do not resemble that very distinctive species; this is probably also due to observers being misled by the ridiculous common name “Common Earthworm.” There are also so few worm taxa in the CV that it just doesn’t have the training to provide good IDs to even the family level. CV identifications of earthworms that I have corrected in the past several months have been wrong about nearly 70% of all IDs and wrong about nearly 90% of species IDs. Although there have been some attempts from earthworm specialists and amateur identifiers to correct misidentified earthworms by either providing correct IDs or moving observations to higher taxa, none of their admirable efforts have managed to undo the CV issues due to the sheer volume of a decade of misidentified observations.
After realizing these issues last year, I started identifying earthworm observations to the best of my ability and tried to provide information about earthworm ID through comments and links to my journal posts. I also applied for curator status so that I could address long-ignored flags on various earthworm taxa; porting the earthworm taxon framework from WoRMS means iNat inherited some bizarre, antiquated, or simply incorrect taxonomy, and many of these issues still stand since I’m not fully sure how to deal with them or haven’t noticed them yet. Few earthworm specialists regularly use iNaturalist (which is understandable since it does not seem very useful for their work) and that means I do not get taxon-specific advice on my own curation flags and have nobody familiar enough with earthworms to provide needed IDs for global earthworm observations.
So far, I’ve focused on correcting and/or supporting Research Grade observations of various common species to try and rein in the CV. Although nearly all observation photos still lack sufficient details to key worms to species (and in some cases, the CV may never be able to offer correct IDs on photos even at family/genus level because dissections are needed), adding more taxa to the CV might at the very least give it more options and make it more “cautious.” Thanks to a few observers and identifiers who are helping me out, several species and genera of earthworms have been included in recent CV models while others have been lost. Recently, I finished correcting all Research Grade Lumbricus terrestris (only a little over half of the ~4,000 observations were correct–no wonder it was causing issues!). Hopefully this is reflected in the next CV update, but it seems unlikely to me that the model will ever perform at even half the level it should, or, more importantly, that enough observers will know to avoid choosing its incorrect suggestions.
What more can I do? I would like to train others to help out with corrections but do not know if there are people willing to spend their time on this. I plan on making more photographic guides to earthworms, but even though I get encouraging and thankful comments on those posts, only a few people who say they will take worm ID photos actually follow through with that. How can I get more people to provide good earthworm photos? Am I identifying things the right way? Are my copy-paste explanations of why users’ blurry earthworm photos aren’t identifiable actually helpful or just a waste of time? What should I do to curate the errors in iNat earthworm taxonomy and common names that both lead to many incorrect IDs?
I know nobody but myself is making me attempt this task, but I feel bad letting this problem persist. If I can’t review recent observations for even a few days, the backlog takes a long time to work through and more wrong RG observations crop up. Even though they are a group that really should not be identified from photos, it still seems a shame for iNaturalist’s earthworms to remain in this situation. I believe that there is still potential for iNat to be a useful tool for recording difficult organisms like these and want to help get it there, but there is a lot of work left to do.