Oh thank you! I appreciate the help anytime. I’ve seen a bunch of your IDs in my notifications - thanks! Especially with the cultivated ones.
I usually do plants, reptiles, and unknowns throughout the day - often before 9 AM, after 10 PM, or around noon. So, no particular time - but I’ll probably see and appreciate anything!
I have fish for the Cape Peninsula set aside for when I have time.
Annotate as dead if needed. Otherwise - next - reviewed - and that is a good chunk cleared. Insects and plants will be - the impossible takes a little longer.
Here’s something interesting I just learned. Overall on iNaturalist, there are about 11% as many identifiers as observers (274,335 identifiers to 2,421,725 observers, currently). I live in the state of Massachusetts, USA, where there are about 33% as many identifiers as observers (18,973 identifiers to 56,355 observers).
Why the difference?
Is it just that Massachusetts has a relatively high concentration of iNat users compared to the world overall (assuming that’s true, by the way)? Have enough people been using iNat for longer in Massachusetts that they feel comfortable making IDs? In California, where iNat originated (I think), there are about 21% as many identifiers as observers (48,737 identifiers to 235,093 observers), quite a lower proportion of identifiers than in Massachusetts.
While there are certainly thousands of IDs still needed in Massachusetts, it seems to me that having about a third as many identifiers as observers is a reasonable goal to help keep up with the ever-increasing flood of new observations. We’ve talked in this forum (probably in this thread!) about how to grow the number of identifiers, but I’m curious about why Massachusetts has a relatively high proportion of identifiers. What are your thoughts?
ETA: More related factoids: In Taiwan, there are 37% as many identifiers as observers. In New York State, there are 29% as many IDers as observers. In New England, there are 25% as many IDers as observers. All pretty respectable ratios, so it’s not just Massachusetts.
My home state, NM, is (surprisingly) at 51% identifiers/observers! 40% of our verifiable observations are needs ID compared to 36% in California, which also has nearly 20 times more verifiable observations as a state!
Interesting! We need a deeper dive into all this. For example, are there more “serious” identifiers in New Mexico than in a state of comparable iNat size, where serious means someone who has IDed more 1000 observations in that state? Or made even 100 IDs? In other words, what’s the distribution of ID activity in New Mexico vs. California vs. Massachusetts? How did the size of the identifier pool in each state grow? Was the growth a consistent percentage of the number of observers over time, or did it jump over time, perhaps after a local ID blitz or CNC event or whatever?
Why does someone become an identifier, anyway?
ETA: 45% of verifiable observations in Massachusetts are Needs ID. I have work to do…
New Mexico is a small state population-wise and we all kind of know each other if only through the internet. Maybe that’s a factor. We’ve also had fairly good participation in the CNC.
Good points! Massachusetts is more than three times the size of New Mexico in population, and I certainly don’t know all the iNatters here.
This deserves a separate thread
There’s some discussion that might answer why in topic: How can we encourage people to learn less-IDed taxa?. Aside from population, it could be better/more relevant field guides?
I’m now surprised that region I live in have pretty much the same number of both, needs id are at 21%, but also number of observations is 1/4 of Massachusetts. I guess higher the count more disproportionate the ratio is.
City based obs (and averaged over the whole state) - many obs, many observers, perhaps a university or academic institutional base for them - but equally enough identifiers to make a difference. If you pick a small town or an in between rural area in MASS, the numbers will skew differently?
Because NM is awesome.
I go through needs ID’s there when I start missing the place
True. But I suspect that if we ask people who use the forum why they became identifiers, we’d get a different answer than if we somehow asked a random sample of iNat users overall.
Good field guides help a lot (glances at the bookshelf I had to buy to keep most of the field guide close at hand). I went to Arizona and Mexico recently, and I felt a bit frustrated in both regions because the available field guides don’t cover very much (except for birds). I still made as many observations as I could, however, but it was hard to give an ID to some organisms.
Interesting question! Assuming I understand your comment correctly, that is. If I ask iNat to zoom to a random small town in western Massachusetts (the area around Charlemont, to be exact), there are an astonishing 557 identifiers to 276 observers!! I suspect that’s because many identifiers pick a large region, like a state or prince, to work on. In the Charlemont vicinity, 39% of the 2,082 observations are Needs ID.
I have increased my identification a fair amount recently. A major prompt was seeing some forum posts about the need for more identifiers and posts about helping with unknowns.
I got addicted and realized I can learn about my local plants through the identification process as well. I also spent a lot of time on the forum learning about iNat culture, something I hadn’t worried about before.
Now I am thinking about creating a project with journal posts that capture what I am learning about local plants. This will help me keep track and could eventually serve as a guide for other iNatters to help identify plants in my area. My thought is to develop some scripts and link back to the project as a comment on IDs.
I also want to keep track of the identification stats in my area, like %needs ID. My personal goal is to get to increase my ID to observation ratio. I’m still working on getting to 2:1 (inspired by something I read on the forum).
Trying to do my part!
I do bird IDs and a couple plants in the southern sierras generally, a relatively underexposed region as far as iNat goes…
for me personally, about a year ago, I noticed that essentially one person outside of this country was providing the vast majority of IDs, I’m on the ground and can reliably identify about 300 species of birds, that’s not anything to brag about, but there’s probably less than 30 people actively IDing birds in this entire country where almost 1600 species of birds can be observed.
Thousands of birders, photographers and naturalists visit this place every year and create hundreds of observations, the least I can do is show these little creatures some respect and help someone figure out what nifty little bird they saw. I am very grateful when folks can do the same for me with things far out of my wheelhouse like native plants or insects.
I’m a birder, when I have the time, I’m happy to share the finite amount of knowledge and perspective I can bring to the table.
I identify worldwide molluscs and I go through all observations of several large groups, but indeed the speed of the observations being posted has been increasing exponentially and it’s getting harder to keep up than before.
I would guess California probably has a very big number of inactive observers, all those students who did one class project and never came back. If I filter for month of July only (no one in school) I get 53,654 observers and 14,661 identifiers, a bit better of a ratio.
Interesting numbers - it appears here in NC, there are around 28% identifiers statewide. However, checking at county levels it seems much higher. In all the counties around mine (rural, high biodiversity, state/national parks nearby), there are more identifiers than observers listed, some as high as almost double. I wonder if it has to do with rural vs. city but even the county including Charlotte with over 1 million people still has 95% identifiers to observers, an almost equal ratio, and our most populous county around our state capital Raleigh still gets up to 61%. It makes me wonder what a county-by-county breakdown of the state would look like to see where the low statewide percentage of identifiers is coming from.