Yes, I too am a specialist, in Auchenorrhyncha (except cicadas)
I do not know about the rest of the people here but atleast I know that I am thinking of taxonomy or iNat for quite some time even when I am not on it.
Interesting! I also wanted to limit my contributions to mis-IDs, but I went the opposite route: I generally do coarse IDs of unknowns.
I’d say that helps just as much, to at least push the record towards someone who might be able to nail it.
I still remember my 100th ID. I decided to have a go at something totally out of the box - a beautiful Ecuadorean beetle - to celebrate. It’s still NeedsID! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/63645995.
I’m glad I didn’t do that for every 100th!
You might be interested in this thread where you can share your future landmarks: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inat-milestones/31211
That’s the observation link again, not a thread.
Doh! Corrected. Thanks!
Thanks so much to everyone for the nice replies. I hope this will encourage others who want to do more identifications. One of my favotite ID methods is to use the “disagreements” filter. Some are challenging and I just skip over them, but there are some really bad IDs. If they don’t get corrected, it takes multiple correct IDs to push an observation to research grade. It’s fun, easy, and it makes me feel good to know that the observer must really appreciate it.
I’ve only identified around a thousand observations so far! you’ve done five times as many I did
Congratulations!
I’d say that helps just as much, to at least push the record towards someone who might be able to nail it.
Yep. Different paths, same destination.
The percentage of people doing IDs is very small. Well done and thank you to all the IDers that do what they can. I appreciate you all. I also do whatever I can and have more IDs than my 17200 posts. I have been on iNat for 3.5 years. It’s a wonderful platform to learn.
Ditto! I have a similar goal. I have been trying to keeping my number of identification to be higher than the number of observations. Also trying to only ID observations that are not yet research-grade of course.
Congrats! I just passed 2000 IDs and definitely felt good when it happened, but 5000 is impressive! While observing is fun knowing the amount of effort I definitely appreciate all professional/expert and citizen naturalist ID’ers helping everyone on here!
Congrats on your milestone!
You mentioned your error rate. Is that something you can find in iNaturalist somewhere?
Congrats! I joined not long ago and definitely share your feeling about being intimidated, but everyone has been nice so far to kindly correct me and help on my IDs. I’m not as educated in nature as others on this site, but I have learned a lot thanks to them and I feel I appreciate even more the diversity that surrounds me :)
I just made up my error rate based upon following all my notifications and there being only a handful of times that someone has come along behind me and provided an ID that indicates mine was wrong. There could be other mistakes, but I don’t think there are very many.