That’s a common saying, you can eat everything, but something only once.
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I do this every day for common reed. It’s very commonly (heh) misidentified as other things and I find myself needing to bump many of the research grade observations back down to something else. It’s like a checkup of sorts.
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Why sorry, I don’t understand
Yes, that was my mistake. Sorry. I meant to respond to @surguramy’s post :
“One of them just got snarky with me too for moving their unknown to “plants”
sigh “
I thought that was funny that someone objected to having an unknown moved to plants.
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I followed :)
I did have someone more recent than that post thank me as they are new to iNat and had no idea, and now they are labeling everything they upload I’m seeing! So it really is worth it to do I think; I use the preform ones I found somewhere on the forum in a thread here, and have a few edited notes added for plants and fungi especially to help people take better photos for ID in future. Usually no one says anything, but I’m at least not seeing ‘repeats’ now of same person multiple days uploading uknowns, so I think it’s helping to keep that pile down. I just keep a notepad open with the text to copy/paste in to comment!
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I should really do that. I have standard text I copy/paste for multiple species in one observation, but if I added information about adding an ID to every Unknown from a new-ish observer, I bet it will help.
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Here’s the ones I’ve grabbed from iNat forum or made myself:
Hi! It seems like you may be new to iNaturalist! FYI, even if you don’t know the exact species of what you have observed, you can search for and select a higher level identification. Even if all you know is “plants (kingdom Plantae)” or “insects (class Insecta)”. Many people helping identify observations on iNaturalist filter the observations by the type of species they know how to ID. So by selecting a general ID, your observation will have a higher chance of being seen by someone who may know what they’re looking at, and that way it can get identified sooner. Here is a video tutorial for the mobile app: https://vimeo.com/162581545
You can take multiple angles and upload into the same observation. This is key to identify most species, especially plants (photos of leaves/pine needles, cones, fruits/flowers, bark, stem, etc) and fungi (top view, underside view, ‘stem’ showing any rings clearly, etc and often if the species stains is important too, and be sure to note the species of wood it is growing on, or the substrate it is growing on).
For all the students uploading dozens or more unidentified things in the university towns that I know should be doing their own work I add:
It seems like you may be doing this for a school project, so I am going to leave your blank ID’s for the rest, so you can practice finding higher level identifications yourself :)
Exact Duplicates (same photos):
This observation appears to be the same as another observation you have uploaded. I have flagged this as a duplicate. In the upper right corner of the observation page, you can click the downward arrow next to “Edit” and choose “Delete.” Thank you!
Near Duplicates (same organism but different photos):
It looks like you uploaded another photo of this organism at the same time. It’s recommended to combine the photos into a single observation rather than to add separate observations of the same thing. I recommend deleting this one and adding the photo to the other observation. Thank you!
Multiple things in one observation:
When you have multiple photos of the same thing it is indeed correct to put them all together, however, for this I am seeing different species in each photo. Please split them out into individual observations so we can help you ID the species correctly!
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Good news! You don’t need to scour and crib from the forum; Those responses are curated in one handy official iNat page for your convenience: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses
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Here’s a link to the frequent response page, with a link to “unknowns” filtered by accounts created within the past 3 weeks: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#addid
There’s another link on the same page for any observations that still need ID (not just unknowns) from accounts created within the last 2 weeks:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#welcome
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that’s where I got them from but I edited a few a little bit.
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Using filters, is there a way to search through “unknowns” only?
Occasionally an inactive taxon or un-grafted taxon sneaks in there but I try to keep on top just about daily.
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Thank you! It really works!
Yep, just think of a project as a big fancy filter.
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I finally ran across the some examples of the “prolifically bad identifier” who are just in it for the imaginary internet points, and put in agreeing IDs for even the most ridiculous, out of range species that bear no resemblance to the actual specimen.
I kind of thought they were a myth, and I’m sad to find out otherwise. Both have around 100k ids to their names, which is horrifying.
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But if it is two particular profiles, easy for help at iNat to do a global sweep of the 100Ks.
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I highly recommend emailing help@inaturalist.org about this.
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Are there particular taxa that are being leadboreded?
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There’s a plant ider who it seems knows a little pool of species and just agrees with them and add their ids, no matter how many times they’re told there’re other species in the area, they keep going and iding it (e.g. every Agrimonia is A. eupatoria for them, even though it’s not even the most common species).
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This isn’t a foolproof method to see how legitimate a user’s IDs are by any means, but I think it can be relatively insightful still: https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?current=&for=&category=&taxon_id=&user_id=dallonw (Using my username for example, don’t bully me or anything.)
If you change the user at the end of the link, it shows you how much of a user’s IDs are agreeing or leading, and other info. Again, not a perfectly clear message is provided by this but I’ve seen some people, who are fairly prolific IDers, and they’ll have maybe 1% leading and the rest are just agreeing. Which seems… odd, sometimes, at least. If not helpful, it’s still just a cool and fun little feature.
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