for you Amy. They are small, but the camera can prove the common name
yellow lady’s hand
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I’m surprised that there’s such a backlog for herps. Generally that’s a group that gets IDed fairly quickly unless there are lots of bad pics or the taxon is one that is hard to impossible to get to species based on photos (such as our Southwest US fence lizards).
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There’s a ton of Sceloporus in NM particularly. That’s one group I usually don’t feel secure enough in to mark the “cannot be improved” box readily though.
There’s also been a ton of tracks, and partial sheds, that I’ve been pretty consistently marking as "cannot be improved (not all of them, but you can’t really ID a shed to species unless you can get a pretty good look at it most of the time)
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I can get the Sceloporus to species maybe half the time. Big areas of Southwest where 2 or 3 morphologically identical species might be present. I’ve started just IDing those as genus only. A group that could benefit from designating a species group or complex we could then dump them in.
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You are doing great! You’re varying what you do, so you keep your interest up. You’ve made lots of ID’s. Of course it doesn’t look like you haven’t made a big dent in the millions “Needs ID” observations. No one person can. But you’re making a big contribution! And I’m working on it and probably everyone else who reads this page is working on it. We’re making progress, prodding millions – millions! – of observations into “Research Grade.”
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After reading this post, been trying a bit harder again and helped gain another 60 or so to research grade.
I remain loyal to the islands mostly but ID where I can if I see something easier.
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And a long walk helped yesterday, too, although my feet hurt by the end! Plus I got to see an immature Bald Eagle (no photo though) and a lovely patch of Downy Rattlesnake Plantain orchid which had flowered this year, and even a good-sized American Elm - OK, all of 4 inches in diameter, but it’s tall enough to bloom now, so I’ll keep an eye on it in the coming years.
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@edanko Wanted to let you know that your post inspired me to make a feature request for an idea on how iNat could speed up the identification process. Submitted it on October 28th and it was approved for posting this afternoon: Buttons to navigate higher/lower taxa in Identify.
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You should see Caribbean Anolis.
I found a way to alleviate my daisy frustration. Instead of doing all random Asteraceae stuck at family, I pick geographic regions. I got through all of Greater Antilles, Lesser Antilles, and Bahamas, and am currently working on San Francisco Bay Area. I have a much higher per-page ID rate this way.
But my goodness, you wouldn’t believe how many Uropappus (Silverpuffs) are misidentified as Achyrachaena (Blow Wives). Silverpuffs have one row of pointy pappus lobes, and Blow Wives have two rows of rounded ones; but I wonder if wishful thinking might be a factor in this case.
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I think one cause is that “blow wives” sticks in the brain better than “silverpuffs”, so more people use that common name.
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Plus you can get the incremental satisfaction of ‘finishing’ a county/state/province/whatever doing it that way
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But they don’t really look much like each other. Even less so than a dandelion seed looks like a salsify seed.
And I just came here from doing more IDs, and I am beginning to wonder: is there a single Uropappus lindleyi on iNat that was not at first misidentified as Achyrachaena mollis? It is, bar none, the most common misidentification I see in Bay Area Asteraceae.
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I can relate; this is how I feel about all records of Penstemon virgatus more than 1 year old. Even though it can be discouraging at times, the more we do, the better the CV suggestions and people’s awareness get.
Fun news: as of today, I’m 1/4 done with the genus of Penstemon. 
I deserve a raise! Next milestone is finishing Colorado.
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Salary doubled. That was easy!
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I didn’t ‘properly’ learn about field guides until I started college, and when you’re living in a mega diverse country there aren’t really comprehensive guides for most groups (e.g. A book listing all the Formicidae species from the country was outdated the next day it was published).
Field guides are great resources but somewhat not really accessible to the layman who wants to learn (when you think in terms of money and language).
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I agree, i don’t think we should be telling people they need to buy field guides, for various reasons. However, some sort of index of links to online resources would be really nice… though i am not sure iNat is the best place to curate it. There are already some linked in taxa pages though.
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If someone wants to participate in easy way of getting rid of Needs Id - Forficula auricularia
Easy to distinguish species with tons of observations in need of id (I don’t know if we have any Dermaptera experts on iNat, observations of this group in general get no attention)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?taxon_id=61524
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So I decided to check this out. There are 19,597 pages of Needs ID exactly at Kingdom Plantae, where as if I assemble a very complex URL to find out how many of those do in fact have lower IDs, it returns 707 pages. So those would be things with phyla conflicts, things where the observer put Plantae and then opted out, situations where someone did a hard disagreement all the way back to kingdom, and the subspecies “bug.” Theorotically (assuming the URL works) the other 18,890 pages are things purely ID’d as Plantate.
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That’s so weird there’re so many “pure” Plantae ids!
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I guess “Plantae” seems pretty safe and intuitive for people who don’t know taxonomy, observers and unknown-sorters both. “Flowering plants” or even “vascular plants” might seem too technical. Plus if you’re an English speaker Plantae sounds like the word plant and that’s easy.
Not to mention the thousands of IDs made using this app which only does kingdom level IDs.
…or it’s entirely possible my URLs don’t do exactly what I think they do ;)
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