Do you opperate in the shadows? i.e. you go through the life observations, unknowns, kingdoms. You send cultivated plants to casual. You go through maverick observations. You sift through your county/state/country/city etc. You go through RG observations.
Or you do anything that doesn’t really get recognised?
If so, me and many many more appreciate you so so much. You’re a hero, you’re a shadow warrior. We need you, and we truly appreciate you a heck ton!
(Maybe comment what you do in the shadows, so you get the recognition you oh so deserve)
Also, I appreciate the folks who go through and annotate others’ observations! Among many other things, they make it so that insect identifiers can focus on juveniles or adults. They help plant identifiers find the observations that actually show flowers (or fruit, etc.). And they mark dead animals so that roadkill, etc. projects can find them and folks who don’t want to see those can filter them out.
Yes! And also the people who add observations to relevant projects (even if it’s not their own observation or project)! I don’t know why but there’s something nice about going to add an observation to a project and finding that someone’s already done it. Plus finding your own observations added to a cool project that you didn’t know about. So, I appreciate those people!
It turns out this is easiest if you review all the casuals for an area, so the tasked turned into reviewing all casuals for an area to see what could be rescued.
I just found a new shadow playground: adding lifestages to endopterygota obs. I had an URL to check my own IDs for ones where I had forgotten to add it, now I removed ident_user_id and did a few other changes (only family or coarser - I think animals identified better than that don’t need my help; ascending order in order to eliminate old ones first and not to interfere with the observer’s workflow; removed “reviewed=any” in order to hide unwanted ones). I add the lifestage if I can (hard for beetles with larviform females and other weird beasts), things I don’t know and empty observations get “reviewed” in order to hide them from myself. Due to the ascending order, I can stay on page 1 and press Ctrl-r when done to get fresh ones. The URL gives some 89k pages, i.e. over 2.6M obs. This should be enough for everybody in the near future.
Other question: I often encounter empty observations (i.e. no ID=unknown, no photo/sound/whatever). Those get marked as “no evidence of organism” in the DQA. Some observations in that new URL (see below) have also no media, but comments/notes about e.g. having seen lampyridae. Should these also be marked as “no evidence” or does the note/comment count as evidence? I tend to assume the latter.
Observations without media will always be casual because they cannot be verified. It should be possible to filter them out using some search option or another. I see no reason to mark them as “no evidence of organism”.
Yes, “No evidence of organism” is not needed if the observation lacks images or sounds. It should only be used for observations with photos of rocks and such.
Just want to appreciate a few specific folks who move stuff from unknown land or mis-IDed land into gall land (where I can find it) either by IDing or tagging me.
I used to try to keep the Nevada Unknowns cleaned up as much as possible but I slacked off for a few months when I got a new job and now there are nearly 2000 observations.
@s_k_johnsgard has been overwhelmed by citrus, and now by Passiflora as well. Too many. And too many are wrongly IDed (CV does not offer the cultivated hybrids - forcing 3 against the CV sp suggestion)
Thankful for the many identifiers who are neither volume nor niche enough to “make the spotlight”, but they keep contributing here and there. Those identifications do add up!
this only occurs if there are at least 10 other observations of a genus or lower in the smallest county-, state-, or country-equivalent place that contains this observation and 80% or more of those observations have been marked as not wild/naturalized, the system will automatically apply a downvote for the qualification organism is wild.