You inspired me to do the same. Olympics on in the background as I typed L A over and over.
Just make sure you don’t press L + A for larvae! I do that sometimes when I’m on a roll.
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something I recently started doing, (partly to grow my ID count, and partly because i like to go through and curate my obs from time to time) is going through old obs to add annotations, and while im there (for the moths especially, inspired by this topic) seeing if i can add or improve an ID on my own observations. First stop, bugguide - if the genus looks like its well mapped out with profiles and maps, i first go through all obs i have of that genus and work them to species. if that goes well and some species seem pretty obvious, i then expand out to needs ID for those species in my state, and then region, until i start to lose confidence. that way, i practice the identifying knowledge i picked up from bugguide and can remember it next time when im in the field, or see something pop up in unknowns or needs ID for my state, which i tend to keep track of
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Agreed! If you don’t know where to start, pick a location of interest (e.g., Europe, North America) and a taxon of some level (e.g., plants, mammals). If you write high-volume identifiers to ask them how you can help, I’m sure they will point you in the right direction.
For example, if someone wrote me (an identifier of bees in North America) I would say helping clear out honey bees in a great way to get started. There’s a bunch of observations and the characteristics to learn how to ID them are simple.
If there are reliable (frequently go through observations) and trusted (ID with high accuracy) identifiers of highly observed species it allows more expert identifiers to devote more time to trickier taxa
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