True and sad. Nonetheless, I think pushing those observations to “dicots” or “plants” is good. At least it gets them out of the way of the non-plant identifiers, and some of us do search such categories from time to time. Not enough of us, of course. I think the basic problem here is that the world is so full of plants and so deficient in plant identifiers. (I keep trying to recruit identifiers.)
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But it’s not, it will be faster that way, depending on how busy iders are, this “faster” can be hours, days or months! But leaving it unknown or Plantae means much less chances of any id.
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Oh, it certainly helps, and that’s why I do it!
My hesitation is that the timeframe for things progressing here is often either a few days/weeks or multiple years. On a quick search, over a third of the observations in my county that are 3 years old or older are still “Needs ID.” Once the time to ID stretches past a certain point, a user’s curiosity has waned - particularly if they’re not already heavily invested.
I think many potential users are turned away when they don’t get answers for a substantial fraction of observations. If those answers come 4 years later, they may have already stopped using the site.
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Sure, sadly there’s such a huge difference in number of iders and observers. And I’m the first to say it works that way, we had plants ided very fast for first 2 years, but since the winter of the previous year they’re no more ided as fast, there was a bioblitz where species matter and our team lost because nothing was checked by experts until months after! And experts were in another group and of course they ided their own observations. I already observed only half plants vs the last year, because what’s the point of multiplying the needs id number, why spend time on observing if nobody needs it? So I get it, and I’m trying to id when I have the mood, everyone should do that imo, we don’t need just one person doing 400k ids, we need hundreds of users each iding at least a hundred observations a week.
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I have also phrased it something like “this broad category enables the database search engine to show your photo to people searching this category” which I guess might also be a little bit overstated seeing as a search for unknowns is possible as well, if less popular.
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I’ve seen several of the “unknown handelers” learn a lot, from calling pretty much every thing Plantae or dicots to knowing some species. So eventually you’ll get it through repetition if nothing else.
In SoCal don’t hesitate to run the computer vision on every plant observation, because it generally works very well. Of course it’s advisable not to blindly submit a species ID based only on the computer’s suggestion; either back it off to genus or do a little assessment of the top two or three results to double check they are plausible.
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True I pretty much always search one county only… I have my account set to default to that location. It’s mainly a strategy to keep from being overwhelmed by numbers, although there’s also value in the fact I have been to all those nature parks, and I usually rule out some species simply because they don’t occur there (perhaps a dangerous strategy but nevertheless useful.) Rarely when I have a lot of time I might pick a species and remove the place filter; for example I sometimes I do Encelia californica everywhere.
LA is hard due to population density just making so many users. There’s a high volume of new users/students who don’t know much about iNat. Lots of cultivated plants. Botanically LA and SD are both hard in that they have both chaparral and desert, basically twice the plants to learn.
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I think one of the best things an identifier can do is to continually broaden what they can ID. This can be done passively as you mention, through repetition, or by actively interacting with experienced identifiers and finding field guides and other resources. The taxonomy feature here on iNaturalist can be extremely helpful with family or genus IDs as well.
I tend to do this quite a bit, especially with observations made in my region. When an observation I’ve made becomes RG, I’ll usually try identifying others’ observation of that species. Recent examples being Butter-and-Eggs, Common Milkweed, and Wild Carrots. It can help split the work between identifiers and shrink that Needs ID pile, even if by a bit.
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BTW that link on your profile where you can filter the Jepson keys by location is super cool!
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There’s lots of overlap in what plants occur in various California counties given they’re frequently part of the California Floristic Province.
Two things that make me a little reluctant to start identifying in LA County:
- I primarily observe in Riverside and Orange Counties, so I wouldn’t have hands-on experience with LA County taxa.
- What’s the workload like? For plants it’s roughly 20-30 new obs. per day with 10x peak during student obs. season for Orange County. Roughly 15-20 per day for Riverside County and I haven’t seen a student peak yet.
Does anyone have a good way to judge how adding another nearby area to one’s identification activities affects time commitment? I’m sure someone has come up with a better metric…
The workload is better if a few people are sharing it. Meanwhile we do what we can.
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Well, you need to first check everything that is uploaded there, so adding up smaller areas and not a whole county at once would work better, then you maybe create an id url with all of them, so only a few new things appear.
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8381 pages of Needs ID plants in LA County!
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That’s why I suggest taking it by small areas, though I don’t know how many people check everything uploaded when there’re so many pages, in those cases I like checking by big groups, if you don’t know something you can just go and mark everything of it as reviewed and save some time.
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I don’t check every single observation in my area, just same day uploads for the current day, usually in the evening. This means:
- I miss observations from people who take a few days or longer to upload.
- I miss observations from people who uploaded after I’ve checked.
I also check for recent observations by area regulars which covers some of the missed identification oppurtunities using this imperfect strategy.
Hopefully it helps shrink the incoming queue a bit for others but I’m probably only seeing 1/3rd of new observations this way at best.
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If it works for you, that’s all that matters, I avoid places with such high numbers (I’m looking at you, Moskovskaya oblast with 2k pages), I have a city to check which still has only a couple big observers and many little ones despite it being one of the most populated regions, and I’m cool with them getting only 120 pages for me to check since spring, that’s what I’m looking for! :D
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Wow, feeling good about my home county having ‘only’ 245! One trick I use to lower the numbers is to limit the time frame, e.g. ID everything I can for March, April, etc., or everything observed more than 5 years ago. Going by month has the added advantage that similar observations of plants in bloom pop up around the same time, making IDs easier.
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Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean - the Transverse Ranges plant communities don’t know about county lines, but I usually don’t end up IDing the San Bernadino range because it’s outside the county. Realistically, I could do pretty well by searching the TR instead of by LA County - I don’t think there’s a place for the whole TR? But maybe there should be.
Here’s a tool I find very helpful: the location-filtered Jepson eFlora.
In my own limited experience IDing across SoCal, there’s a lot of overlap. There’s plenty between LA County and Orange/Riverside: they’re all adjacent, and LA already picks up the coast + inland + mountains + Mojave. The overlap between Transverse and Peninsular Range communities is pretty strong. I think hesitation is reasonable - but also, someone coming in with a working knowledge of other SoCal counties is going to be super helpful. Even getting things to genus would be fantastic.
And as for workload - since Sept 1, it looks like new plant obs are ~250-300 per day. But no one has to do all of them. Taking even a dozen out of the pool is helpful. It’s only as much of a time commitment as you commit, y’know? I don’t try to get through everything, I just do as much as I enjoy.
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really, even having more assistance with the perpetual influx of cultivated obs would up my morale
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If you have any specific day/time in mind to work on it, I can try to clean some up just before or during that time.
edit: are you doing unknowns or starting with plants?