Here is a fun challenge - Try to innovate. Make the most useful project possible. I am listing some projects that are excellent and their shortcomings too. We (I mean, who ever is interested) will attempt to make a useful (and great) innovation to use the pre-existing projects. In the end of this …

I don’t know any generic “tree” people to ask. I know people who are interested in certain groups of trees, but if I don’t know what tree it is, how do I know who to ask?

As I ID I have learnt who are the handful of people I can ask here. Who steps forward for a tree, who leaves helpful comments - why it is this sp not that one, whose profile says I love trees! Trees are hard - unless they have flowers. Or fruit. Or cones.

Oh, wait I did think of one person that I tag sometimes. I’d hate to bombard them with tags so I’ll have to come up with some other people. If was to make a project, it should be called “Trees That Need IDs”.

As long as these are you own, they are qualified.

I’ve been sorting through plant observations stuck at high levels (phylum or class) and the number of observations of trees or their parts (leaves, twigs, etc) make up a goodly portion of them, so a project of “trees needing ID” would be a useful place to put them so tree people can easily find them…

[image] lappelbaum: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/trees-that-need-ids That project already has 1700+ obs added to it in 4 days? That is approximately 4250 obs. added per day - congrats! That was a very nice idea.

@jeanphilippeb helped me to pull in observations from some smaller tree projects and from the Tree observation field https://www.inaturalist.org/observation_fields/34 It’s going to me much slower after all that since I don’t have very many members yet (6)

You can make a copypasta comment for obs of trees - your tree needs an ID and we have this project, come … Plenty of people love trees, observe trees. But finding the right project can be difficult, or outright impossible. Or if you write a journal post - you can link to that in a comment or relevan…

I hadn’t gotten into ways to spread the project yet. You have some good ideas that I will definitely implement. I also will put it on my profile and share on Discord and additional forum threads. On another note, I decided not to try to import observations from the southern Africa tree projects and…

Make the most innovative project you can

General

lappelbaum January 26, 2026, 2:28am 38

Okay, I made it

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/trees-that-need-ids

and added some observations from around the world

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Make the most innovative project you can

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