Hello, my name is Ravi and I have only been using iNaturalist for a couple of weeks now and have loved it. I’m also very new to learning about different wildlife. In the last couple of weeks, I have made lots of observations and it has helped me to start learning different plants/fungi/wildlife and …

[image] lothlin: most people just… put stuff in fungi. There seems to be a general impression that mushroom foraging takes a more esoteric level of knowledge than wild-plants foraging.

Well, I think that’s kinda true. As a very amateur forager I feel like edible plants are much easier to find and positively identify than mushrooms. Nobody is going to mistake raspberries or garlic mustard but you see people get confused about what is and isn’t chicken of the woods all the time, and…

[image] alloyant: Nobody is going to mistake raspberries or garlic mustard Also most poisonous berries taste spit-out awful, which isn’t necessarily true with mushrooms.

I’ll be honest, i fully dont understand people who cannot recognize chicken of the woods. It takes approximately five minutes of research to know what to look for. They are so insanely distinctive but people still somehow manage to mistake Jack-o-lantern mushrooms for them despite the gills. (Specif…

That is exactly correct. It’s like flipping through a bird field guide to find the one you just saw; you’ll recognize others based on flipping pages and seeing pix. Also, I feel I have an obligation to spend time doing IDs to repay the time and effort of others who’ve done them for my obs. I’ve e…

‘25% of IDs are made by 130 users’ I am torn between awe, with grateful thanks for all the kind hard work. And horror that it rests on so VERY few shoulders!

[image] wildskyflower: The CV makes errors, but they are almost invariably predictable errors; I don’t often see it make the same kind of silly random errors. The CV has difficulty with non-cropped arthropod photos where there is a lot of background in addition to the organism in question. It…

CV does some wildly hilarious things with fungi sometimes and it makes me wish that it based things off of more than the first picture. Just look at the suggestions given here - they aren’t even in the right family, let alone genus or species [image] though as much as I laugh at it sometimes it …

To help international newbies, I’ve made a preliminary translation of the table in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauchfuß (which I use a lot) and put it in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ralf_Muschall/Prolegtable . If I get no veto from other Wikipedia users, I intend to insert it into https://e…

[image] wildskyflower: It is true that most observations ID’d to ‘dicots’ will probably stay there for the foreseeable future, but that is mainly because most observations ID’d to dicots actually are difficult or impossible to refine further. Not since we’ve had a lot of people not very famil…

New to iNaturalist and trying to help with identifications

General

Topic		Replies	Views
I'm no specialist, how should I proceed with my observations? General	35	2576	January 4, 2022
New to iNaturalist – Best Way to Identify Unfamiliar Species? General	37	1260	July 15, 2026
Heavy sigh. Comments regarding the UNKNOWN option of identifying the observation General	140	3555	September 22, 2024
Why won’t anyone help identify my specimens I find? General	112	2564	June 19, 2026
Identify identifiers IDs General identify	126	3803	September 13, 2025

New to iNaturalist and trying to help with identifications

Related topics