Yeah, I’ve seen a few herbarium specimens that were mis-identified, even though they were collected and IDed by very competent professional botanists. And I haven’t had a reason to look at lots of herbarium specimens, either. So, yeah, even experts make mistakes, much less people like me. It is really great to have people looking at and correcting my IDs on my observations. I’m hoping to learn more plants in 2022, so I can repay the ID favors.
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If the NeedsID pile begins to consistently get smaller, it will eventually disappear. iNat would then be a very different experience for identifiers. You would have to wait for things to come in to identify, and then other people might well get there before you while you’re at work (or whatever). It would become a much less dynamic environment, with fewer learning opportunities. I’m not saying the current non-equilibrium between observations and identifications is ideal, but let’s just remember that the NeedsID Pile is what keeps iNat ticking. There is always a mountain of sweeties to get our teeth stuck into. Viva la NeedsID Pile!
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Agreed about physical collections such as herbariums. Unless an expert in a taxon visits the collection or requests a loan of material to examine, some specimens can sit untouched in a cabinet and remain incorrectly IDed (or not IDed) for years or decades. Although digital photography and scanning has made access to images of these specimens somewhat better.
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If there’ll be no needs ID as of now, people upload so much, it won’t take long to fill the pile in, some groups are just not checked and will grow no matter what until someone starts reviewing them. I think more free time would mean more opportunities to check old ided stuff and find mistakes.
As observer I really can’t care too much about iders need’ to learn by those observations if that means I will have them stuck at needs id forever.
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My thought experiment was kind of hypothetical - the discussion above just made me try to imagine what iNat would be like without a NeedsID pile. I suppose the counter to that is that if we ever ran out of things to ID we would just need to go out and do more observing!
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Like it is for birds? Just kidding. I’ve actually never looked at Needs ID for birds, but with the way my personal bird observations are treated, I imagine the pile is relatively small.
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Ha! Yes I would imagine the same. Perhaps surprisingly there are 663,000 observations in the Aves NeedsID pile! But that is only about 5.6% of the total observations. Compare with insects - twice as many observations, but nearly 50% in the NeedsID pile (just over 10m!). Perhaps the birders have found that perfect equilibrium?
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Ah man I’ve got what I think is a merlin that’s been languishing in Needs ID for months :P
Sometimes pushing the ID to … I think it is this, so long as you follow your notifications, works.
You either get a prompt - Not a merlin, or agreement.
There are 71,000 stuck in class Aves, compared to 11,857,019 overall, so more like 0.6% are actually not IDd beyond ‘bird’. It seems to me that if an observation in class Aves isn’t IDed within an hour it is either genuinely hard (like tracks, scat, bones, eggs, or a nest) or there is something wrong with the observation, or both. And a lot of that stuff will only get out of ‘needs ID’ when someone checks '‘cannot be improved’.
By comparison 1,870,816/35,857,963=5.2% of ‘Plant’ observations are at class or higher. Honestly, that seems pretty good given how many are just a leaf or landscape shot, but it clearly isn’t ever getting to the level of ‘Aves’
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Well, now that I’m working on Asterceae for Vancouver Island, I’m not sure the computer vision is even the problem. Adenocaulon bicolor vs. Mycelis muralis seems to be the V.I. equivalent of the Bay Area’s Achyrachaena vs Uropappus – lots of people wishing that their Mycelis observation was Adenocaulon. The thing is, the default picture of Adenocaulon bicolor shows the observer’s hand turning over a leaf to display the white underside, which Mycelis muralis lacks. If people would just do that simple thing, they wouldn’t make that identification mistake.
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There are so many plant observations where I wish the observer had added just one more photo, showing, for example, the number of needles in a cluster of pine needles, or a nice clean leaf from that oak tree where they took a photo of the bark, or (conversely) the bark of the tree where they took a photo of the leaf of what might be a Hop Hornbeam. And so on. Short of writing comments on every such observation, I don’t know how to get this sort of information out to observers.
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I know I certainly appreciate that kind of feedback! Though sometimes it isn’t easy to get all the photos that would be helpful, like if all the leaves are out of reach. For some species, user commented tips are better than any available printed key.
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My chosen pile
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=10&place_id=123155
sits around 5K pages.
But - since I clear the new ones as they come in, and chew away at the older backlog
It is NOT the SAME 5K !
Which is okay 5K is a nice round target, and one day, I will dip below it.
It is good to choose a target that you can see move.
I added this one, and see stuff from October which seems to have slipped thru the cracks. Moving steadily down. 166 pages …
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=10&iconic_taxa=unknown&order_by=observed_on&place_id=6987
You can tweaks URLs and filters to get a possible target for yours.
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I think it’s one of iNat points you can upload any photo, but there could be more guidelines, anyway problem is in ratio, if there would be more iders than observers, no blurry photo would stop them from clearing the pile.
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I think it’s the result of positioning iNat as learning tool, it’s a compromise website takes to get more people into it, I think it’s working as there’re many correct RGs too, they’re just not noticed that much as Needs ID. That’s why I think taking such actions seems as not very plausible, even though they could actually work, as they have a potential of scaring people off. Maybe if we still will be alive when new guidelines will see the light of sun, it will change id situation for the better.
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I like that idea. A video game before you start. I see good intentions and enthusiasm … sliding into a wrong species, that takes many votes to overturn.
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Or bumping something all the way back to family because you disagree with the exact species. I see that every day in Asteraceae, and often, it could have been bumped back only to subfamily, or tribe, or sometimes even genus, and been at a finer ID than family.
You don’t even necessarily have to know about those infrafamilial levels. If you start typing “Thistle,” among the two choices will be “Thistles and Allies” and “Thistles and Burdocks.” Either one of these will work if you disagree with the exact species but at least agree that it is a thistle. They will work even if you don’t know about Subfamily Carduoideae or Subtribe Carduinae.
Similarly, if you see that the flower is basically dandelion-looking, you can start typing “Dandelion,” and one of your choices will be “Chicories, Dandelions, and Allies.” This will work even if you have never heard of Subfamily Cichorioideae.
Yet in these cases and many others, the person disagreeing with the species will revert it all the way back to Family Asteraceae – thus making it that much harder to get to a finer level than family.
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“Oh, it’s not THAT beetle, it’s another one, so it goes back to Insecta” :)
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I see people bumping up all the way to Kingdom, but I don’t think most understand all the levels they are disagreeing with. In my opinion, this is important information and needs to be spelled out in the observation itself (or at least naming a few of them–something liike “Identifier disagrees that this is a Seep Monkeyflower, or a Monkeyflower, or a Dicot, or a Flowering Plant, or a Vascular Plant”).
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