It can be seen that if there are such group, must be plenty of observations remain unsettled. What should we do to help the community? Invite some relatively professional researchers to iNat or local iNat users study hard and be experts themselves? For me, I come with knowledge of asian groups and …

Cnidarians always need more attention! https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/help-id-indo-pacific-corals https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/help-needed-curating-coral-observations

…and this would be why I have exactly 2 mosses and 1 lichen in my posted observations, even though I’ve taken more photos than that. Up until now, if I’ve photographed lichens it’s been beause of their aesthetic value (oooh, look how those colors contrast with that boulder!), and not for a formal ob…

Not necessarily groups, but regions and classes of organisms for sure. I’m currently working in SE Asia and for many observations there simply aren’t people to engage in the IDs. This is not unique to this region, large swaths of Africa, South and Central America, Central Asia, and the Pacific Isl…

In the fungi section I spent most of my time in I’ll say most things that aren’t getting IDed are things that can’t reliably be IDed with macroscopic photos. Lichens for example are always going to be a mess because you can’t do most past genus, so most past that aren’t accurate. As for what could …

You have reminded me to mark “as good as it can be” on my Cladonia observations that are sitting at genus level, at least the ones where someone else has agreed with my ID as Cladonia. I don’t want other identifiers to waste their time on them. (Ditto many other genera as well, and not just fungi.…

I would be happy just to get my flies IDed to genus, but most of them sit at family or higher for years: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/37398514 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/56677260 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/75888628 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/…

It varies from family to family. In Syrphids you’ll often get a species ID, in muscoids you could be stuck at superfamily even. It’s a combination of factors. They are hard, and information is hard to come by and therefore there aren’t many identifiers.

I’m a botanist, so flies aren’t my thing, but I know fly people. Like @matthewvosper , I think the problem is probably a combination of both – there are a limited number of specialists to do IDs, and probably for most fly groups you need at a minimum multiple shots of the body from different angles …

There’s definitely a couple boletes that I’m personally really confident that I can ID that I’ll go through periodically and confirm and/or correct observations on, but that said, even some super obvious stuff can be really complicated by the amount of look alikes and/or necessary plant associations…

For sure! There’s currently a ton of chanterelles stuck in genus for that reason since people only recently learned there’s oodles of “golden chanterelles”. I generally stick to the “red suillus” species when doing bolete IDs, since it seems like the most doable chunk to bite off.

Is there any groups on iNat that with only a few or even no expert (or regionally no) to help?

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Is there any groups on iNat that with only a few or even no expert (or regionally no) to help?

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