If you upload your obs with your own ID, and you ID for others 1.25 as many obs - we could do it.
Obvs not those which do not show adequate field marks.
But if you upload without your own ID, then we ‘need’ 2.5 times as many IDs ‘from you’ to balance out the IDs you need.
Ultimately amazing that 25% of IDs come from 130 users !! 1% of users provide 75% of our IDs. And then what a loss it is if a superidentifier takes um and removes all their IDs.
While this is true, it’s also the case that it’s easy for a toddler to say, “Mommy, Daddy, what is that?!”
“What is what, honey?” (landscape photos)
It takes a lot more knowledge and confidence to actually answer the kid’s question.
And you might get tired of answering questions all day (identifier burnout), especially if you get the feeling that the kid doesn’t really care about the answer (observer does not respond to communication).
Am I the only one who treats IDing as a virtual hike ? What did you see ? What even IS that ?
I have plenty of such observations. Sometimes they get ID-ed - nice surprise, thank you identifiers!
I also have plenty. This is my oldest (6y) and will not be identifiable to species. I think now, it’s probably just a moss “leaf”, and the CV seems to agree with me, but yeah… No idea
It is a moss.
Haha thanks! I guess I’ll have to pick every moss in our garden and compare the “leaves” to find out what species it is. :P
If anyone wants the link to see these, here it is, just swap out my username for yours: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?order=asc&quality_grade=needs_id&user_id=jamie-aa
A lot of them are to be expected - they’ll be cryptic species, things with lots of lookalikes, or even things that are total mysteries. But quite a few of them are things that are fairly easy to ID and just got missed when they were fresh and uploaded - and who looks at page 357,000?
Every so often I’ll ID “Needs ID” sorted by Random, and often you’ll come across years-old observations of very easy species that just got missed when they had the most eyes on them. Those always feel the sweetest to get to RG.
Another type of needs id observations that might be worth helping get to research grade are specimens from museums/herbariums/collections that have species and date info.
The earliest observed date for a specimen that needs ID is 1893. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/63260997
The iNaturalist Explore page, grid view shows Jan’ 93, so people might mistakenly think it is from 1993, when it is really from 1893.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?order=asc&order_by=observed_on&quality_grade=needs_id
I created a website that adds more features the explore page. One of the features is to display the observed, add, and updated dates to the observations grid view. That can be a quick way to see the time difference between when the observation was observed, when it was added to iNaturalist, and when it was updated,
Why should these be given particular attention? They will, as a general rule, have already been ID’d by someone with expertise (i.e., they do not need someone to determine what species it is) and if it is part of an institutional collection the record is presumably already documented somewhere and may already be part of GBIF. Observations can be used for training the CV or for reference on iNat even if they are not RG.
In addition, using iNat to upload large collections that were not collected by the user is discouraged; there are other ways to get this material on GBIF. A specimen from 1893 should not be eligible for RG in any case according to iNat’s guidelines.
In my experience, a large percentage of specimen photos do not include the amount of detail required to confirm the ID. In some percentage of cases, people posting their private collections do not seem to manage to consistently upload observations with the date and location of collection instead of the date and location at the time the specimen was photographed.
None of these factors suggest to me that specimens should be prioritized for ID over other types of observations.
Hi Diana. I’m pretty new to iNat but I must admit that I find myself making time to take a virtual hike and ID whatever I can (with my limited knowledge) every day. It seems at the moment I’m having as much fun IDing the observations of others as my own!
Just so this doesn’t devolve into another ‘observers never identify anything’ moment, there are plenty of people who observe AND identify their own observations. Yet it doesn’t mean they are more knowledgeable and confident than the next person, just that it’s where their interests lie.
Except in New England in the dead of winter (now) when the temperature is hovering well below freezing, and there’s nothing much to observe but tracks in the snow (exciting!) birds at the feeders (fun!) moss and lichen (hard to ID!) and dead or dormant plants (which will never get IDed.)
Then it’s more fun to Identify, especially if you filter for plants in the summer months, so you get to see green and growing things from the comfort of your warm home, perhaps with a nice cuppa tea.
But we all know from your stats that you think identifying is way more fun than observing, anyway…
We could go dip-netting for dragonfly larvae and such in the rivers, if they’re not frozen over.
OK, that’s a stretch. Even if the rivers aren’t frozen, one’s fingers soon will be.
I haven’t made any new observations in months, alas. I really do need to get out somewhere soon.
10,117 observations
5,622 research grade
Although I try to take many pictures and quite good quality.
There just is not enough identifiers. And also ofcourse it can tire them up when most observations are of the common species and many times info is missing to make sure identification
And also, when mobile app doest really work for identifying (on those phones I have tried attleas it always crashes), reduces identifications.
What if superidentifier dies, and somebody deletes all his/hers accounts from the internet, including iNat. Do all the identifications vanish the same time? That should not be possible
Yes. Identifiers do choose to delete all their IDs. That is part of the reason why we need to spread IDs across more people. So an individual loss is not a disaster.
Just linking this older thread which touches on many similar ideas:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-to-do-with-long-unidentified-observations/5728
Another problem is needless duplication. Opinions may differ regarding reporting multiple individuals of a species all found at the same location/date, but the fact remains that each additional observation exacts a finite, non-zero toll both on identifiers as well as on iNat’s system resources (bandwidth, storage, processing, etc.). I wonder what the carbon footprint of the average iNat observation would be.
But reporting the same individual repeatedly definitely should not happen, yet some projects encourage the practice. I filter one such project from my view and try to avoid contributing any IDs.
Not an expert but I’d imagine it’d be really quite small. The carbon output of having a few megabytes sitting on a hard drive is going to be almost negligible (I don’t know enough about the exact drives amazon uses, but a hard drive should only use a few watts while idle, and should be able to store something on the magnitude of one million photos). I think the only relevant figure is then going to be from the files actually being loaded. Carbon estimates are extremely difficult, but if we want some really rough ballpark, if I’m parsing it correctly this white paper estimates ~20 grams of carbon emitted for every gigabyte of data streamed. If we extrapolate this figure, every time I open an iNat obs I am loading a scaled down image (about 500KB on average in my experience) and some other data. If we approximate this loads about 1MB data, then if my observation is opened 100 times (I’d be shocked if the average obs is opened that often!) this would emit about 2 grams of carbon, the equivalent of driving 8 meters!
Of course these figures come from oversimplifying and are probably far off, but we’re still talking about something a number of orders of magnitude away from most of the more typical sources of carbon. I feel fairly confident that even for a fairly prolific observer if, say, iNaturalist encouraged them to drive to a park an hour away a single time, that trip is probably going to beat the carbon output of all the observations they’ve ever made.
As an aside I believe AWS has a carbon estimate calculating tool. I do not know how reliable it is (I do not trust corporate estimates of their own emissions), but if it is actually accurate I wonder if iNat staff could look at that and get something more definitive.
I agree that the carbon footprint of a single iNat observation is likely to be negligibly tiny. It will be dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the effort of the observer to get to the location where they are observing, the energy that went into creating their phone/devices, and the energy their body expended while experiencing the observation in real life. An iNat observation is truly value-added. All that said, we’ve had several previous threads veer off to debating sustainability of iNat usage, so let’s keep this one on its focus. A new thread on sustainability related to iNat or reopening one of the older ones are totally fine to continue discussion like this!