You can filter by taxonomy or location in the identify tab. I started by picking a few organisms I know and identifying those or places I grew up in and was familiar with what people might be seeing. Dont hesitate to identify to even something as broad as beetles or anatidae if the identification is even more broad, every little bit helps to get it in front of an expert doing what I suggested in the first part of the comment
3 Likes
Well, 92% of plant observations are already at genus or better, so the statement ‘most’ is justified on the whole over all observations. It would almost surely not be true that 90% of currently ID’d to class or above plants can be identified to genus or better. I don’t know what the percentage there would be.
1 Like
Are you including cultivated plants in that 92%?
What % for wild plants?
Hi Ravi! Welcome to iNat!
I have been doing the same, honestly, and I am not as new. For example, if I see a skull obs, for instance (am in a skull and bones project) and someone IDed it as a ringtail lemur, I might agree that it is a lemur, but since I don’t have as much knowledge on discerning exact species, I will ID it as lemur sp. A pop-up will appear, asking me if I think it is a lemur but not ringtailed, or if I am not sure but I do know it is a kind of lemur. I’ll choose whichever I think is appropriate.
In my opinion, any contributions are helpful, and in my experience, a more knowledgeable person will add their ID and explain specific identifying features in a photo to me.
All-in-all, I don’t think it’s distracting, and I think that even a more broad ID can be helpful too. As you use iNat more and more, you’ll find ways to ID certain organisms better.
Hopefully I explained this all in a way that makes sense, lol.
Have a great day, and have fun with iNat! :)
2 Likes
Verifiable plants: 60,085,444
Verifiable plants genus or better: 55,394,223 (92%)
Captive plants: 7,290,948
Captive plants genus or better: 6,358,479 (87%)
South Africa specifically is at 93% for verifiable plants being ID’d to genus or better.
I think we spend a disproportionate amount of cognitive effort thinking about the hard ones, so it can give us the psychological impression that the hard ones are in the majority, when they are not. Basically the availability heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
7 Likes
Thanks for reminding me that I see the problem children, because I choose to focus on them. I will keep reminding myself of the 92% !!
3 Likes
I’m honestly about to give up observing mushrooms. Twelve uploads between May and July, most of them I provided a best-guess initial identification to family, genus, or species, and only one shows any sign of having even been looked at. (The only reason I know it was looked at is because it was split, and my field-guide species ID therefore now applies only to the Old World populations; it was looked at [and disagreed with] by someone using the new taxonomy.)
2 Likes
TBH if you’re not getting info I would just tag people -a lot of us are busy out in the woods since we only have a couple month period where we can actually find lots of stuff XD
I did go through your stuff and try to help where I could, if that helps.
If its any consolation, this (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?created_d1=2023-07-01&created_d2=2023-07-05&place_id=any&user_id=lothlin&verifiable=any&iconic_taxa=Fungi) is fungi I’ve uploaded just this month and you can see how few have had much interaction. 124 observations and 12 at research grade - though TBH there’s a lot in here that is only going to get down to genus at best until it can get DNA tested
2 Likes
Thank you @giannamaria ! It does help me to get perspectives and experiences from people who have been using the site for a while! As I have been learning more and more about the site and different ways of using it, I have been a lot more selective on putting identifications and I think that has helped take some of the stress off! I think all the experts telling me I don’t have to ID everything has helped a lot even though initially it was a little bit difficult :D
And @jasonhernandez74 as I am learning more and more I can at least look and see if I can get a little more attention on any of your Fungi!
1 Like
For non-plant people, getting a plant observation to family or genus may not be much quicker or easier than it is for a plant person to determine the correct order of an insect observation – and yet people are regularly told that they should do the former, beginner or not. If “just dump it in plants” is frowned upon, I don’t see how “just dump it in insects” is any better.
It’s totally fine if pterygota is as far as you (generic ‘you’) can take an observation, or if insects aren’t where you choose to focus your energy; I’m not arguing with that. But I’m assuming that most people who help ID unknowns and/or stuff at a high level are motivated not merely by a desire to help out on iNat, or the satisfaction of sorting observations and seeing the numbers of unknowns go down, but also – at least a little – by an interest in learning and discovery. In this context, deciding from the outset to just label as pterygota and move on to the next rather than considering whether you can provide a more specific ID seems like something of a missed opportunity.
I imagine there’s some regional variation about what practices are going to be the most effective. In my part of Europe, there are both plant IDers who specialize in particular genera or families (regionally or worldwide) and also IDers who are familiar with the local flora and help with a wide range of plants in a particular region. The latter group do indeed look at plant observations with an ID of plants or angiosperms or dicots. Again, it will of course generally be faster if a reasonably specific ID is provided from the outset, but this is true of all taxa, not just plants.
There also isn’t a one-size-fits all best practice for IDing. There are different ID cultures/communities within iNat and part of IDing is becoming acquainted with those cultures and where one fits in.
Personal inclinations also play a role, too – one’s own interests and background. It’s totally fine to be selective about what you ID, and I think most users gravitate towards certain types of IDing as they figure out what they are best at and what they find most satisfying.
For example, I ID almost exclusively within West-Central Europe, as part of my way of becoming acquainted with the flora and fauna of my adopted homeland. Other users enjoy the opportunity to virtually travel and explore places they haven’t been to or have visited in the past. Within this regional focus, I do a lot of mid-level IDs for plants and insects/hexapods – i.e., moving stuff from high-levels to lower ones where specialists can find them, or helping resolve disagreements – because this is where I feel I can be most useful. I also do finer-level IDs for bees, as far as my expertise allows. But even within this broad IDing activity, there are some taxa I am more comfortable with than others. “Plants” really means “dicots”, as I am rubbish at grasses and conifers and I know very little about mosses. Grasshoppers and ants all tend to look alike to me, but with some other insect groups I’m more comfortable venturing a finer ID even where I’m far from being a specialist. There are other taxa that I ignore almost entirely (gastropods, for example, or fish) because I lack all but the most basic background knowledge about them and they don’t happen to excite me enough to engage with them in depth.
I suspect it is probably somewhat less of an issue for plants than arthropods (better CV suggestions, subject less likely to flee during photographing), but I see a fair amount of egregiously wrong IDs that could have been avoided by taking a moment to consider what was actually being suggested. Things like CV-inspired IDs for species or genera that aren’t even found on the continent where the observation was made, or don’t particularly resemble the species observed even if one has very little knowledge about the taxon in question (on the level of, say, a greyish housefly being ID’d as a yellow-and-black wasp). A reasonable portion of such IDs come from new users, or Seek users, but by no means all. If the purpose of iNat is to encourage people to engage with nature, it seems like an important step in the process is being missed if one does not look at what one saw and put a bit of thought into what it is, or if one cares so little that one will immediately and uncritically accept any ID that is put forth.
I don’t expect anyone to immediately become experts in what they observe – quite the contrary – but I’m certainly more enthusiastic about IDing observations where the observer shows some sign of interest and caring and a minimum of effort to not make unnecessary work for IDers.
I also realize that when many users quickly agree to an ID suggested by another user, even though the context of the agreement suggests that they probably don’t understand how the ID was made, it is often a way of expressing that they are grateful for the ID. But there’s a sense in which this sort of agreement devalues the efforts and the knowledge of the experts providing the IDs.
6 Likes
I agree with this point. It can be disheartening when people don’t seem all that interested in IDs, like when someone has dozens of observations but always posts them as “unknown”. It comes across as “do even this basic thing for me, please, because I can’t bother” and not very considerate of other people’s time and effort.
In terms of people adding wrong IDs, I think it’s often a side effect of the computer vision system. It suggests an ID and people just trust it. Maybe some people are just lazy, but I think many users just don’t really understand how it works and how it can be fallible. There seem to be relatively few indications on the main site about the pitfalls of blindly trusting automatically suggested IDs, and not everyone is particularly tech-savvy. If I didn’t know about it, I’d probably choose whatever it suggested even if it seemed implausible (such as a species that doesn’t exist in the area) due to assuming it knew better than I ever could.
5 Likes
The issue with plants applies only to some plants – plants in Africa that have only a broad ID. Some very active identifiers there want the plants left at “unknown” unless they can be identified at family level or lower. For the rest of the world, anything you can do to put the plant in a lower category, including “Plants” or the infamous “Dicots,” is fine.
I consider ID’ing insects to Pterygota to be good, though I admit that may be because that’s the best I can do outside maybe three orders I can recognize. Why wouldn’t I put a little more effort into it and get an order name for the insects? To be honest, it’s a variation on “I don’t care.” I’m out there photographing plants and I see insects so I photo them. I hope they’ll be interesting or useful to others, but I put most of my time into the plants. If I learn a few insects along the way, good, but I’m not going to put effort into naming them. (Maybe if I had another life time . . . .)
7 Likes
The wrongest IDs I see are almost invariably not CV IDs, including my own. For example, one time I took an observation that I was convinced was a hummingbird because of how it flew, and I posted it ID’d as such. The CV’s top suggestion was a moth, which I ignored because I thought it was a hummingbird. In fact, it was a moth. In retrospect, if I had looked more closely, it was obviously not a bird. If I had just blindly clicked the CV’s top moth suggestion, it would have been the correct species. 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.
6 Likes
We work as a team - observer, identifier, @mention.
Sometimes it rolls out like clockwork.
I know it is A Moth, and CV for tentative Subfamily plus an @mention - got me another @mention.
I have a species obs in Cape Town, where the the nearest obs is way up the coast in Plettenberg Bay. On a good day iNat is awesome!
4 Likes
I have an example from yesterday of the Computer Vision actually being wrong for me, but the community helped me to correct. I posted a tree with the Seek Application and it was identified as an “Orchid Tree”. I didn’t think much of it, but then I went home and looked at other orchid tree leaves and they didn’t look similar to me. I researched different trees and the iNaturalist website actually suggested the “mulberries” genus. I ended up asking a couple people on the Discord to help me identify and it ended up having a community consensus of “Red Mulberry - morus rubra”.
So my two lessons here: if the Seek AI doesn’t get it right, then one could try going back to the observation on iNat and seeing iNat’s suggestion and also that computer vision might be right most of the time, but you still have to think about what it put and kind of verify that it makes sense
2 Likes
Keep in mind that Seek doesn’t take location into account when suggesting IDs, which can definitely skew it. Something from a different part of the world might be more visually similar to what Seek is “seeing” and that will skew it.
3 Likes
Right, no one is saying you should always just blindly accept the CV or that the CV is never wrong.
Interestingly, with the observation in question, even if I turn off ‘seen nearby’ and force it to only suggest things in family fabaceae, it still only ranks ‘Orchid Tree’ as the fifth most similar looking Legume. It thinks the most similar looking Legume is redbud, which seems like a plausible most similar legume. I wonder why Seek ranked it so differently.
2 Likes
Seek’s model is also from about 2020, so that might have something to do with it. It was trained on different data.
3 Likes
Yes, I get this – there are plenty of groups that simply don’t interest me enough at present to engage with in depth and if I happen to observe them for whatever reason I typically put a broad label on them and leave them for others to figure out (or not, as the case may be).
But an individual preference seems a bit out of place as general IDing advice. I should note, though, that my IDing practice tends to involve a lot of just skipping over observations that don’t interest me and/or where I don’t feel like I can contribute much. My assumption is that other people with different interests are also looking at things so eventually everything should get covered.
I suppose if one has set oneself a goal of clearing out a particular batch of unknowns one might pursue a different strategy that might involve more sorting into specific broad categories as quickly as possible without trying to take anything further.
2 Likes
If you are IDing for others, and adding your best broad ID
please check carefully first for
observers who have been tricked into using the placeholder.
Prime real estate on an English language website in the top right corner 
iNat vanishes that info with the first ID.
I am told that is not a bug. It is working as intended. iNat knows the placeholder is temporary.
And iNatters whether observers or identifiers will learn the hard way. I did. As I clicked … wait! … what did that say?? Now I look for the placeholder first - and help iNat by moving the human info to a comment. Clunk clunk clunk.
3 Likes