My awareness of the biodiversity around me has increased enormously since I started identifying. There are so many taxa I simply never knew existed until I saw someone post a pic of one, and then started looking for it myself.
I’d like to remind anyone who is hesitant to start doing IDs of a few things:
- It’s fine to just do the easy ones! Every “easy” identification you take out of the ID queue makes the harder ones easier to find for experts. If you can identify a Western Honey Bee, and go through everything in the “Bees” category just IDing those, it concentrates the pool of weird little complicated bee observations. Then the bee experts can focus on those, and not spend half their time on honeybees.
- Don’t be afraid to tag other identifiers if you’re second-guessing yourself - you’ll learn a lot just by asking things like “This looks like x species, but I’m not totally sure how to distinguish it from Y species, @graysquirrel what do you think?”
- I made a wiki with some of the very useful tasks that even non-experts can help with: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/useful-inaturalist-tasks-for-non-experts-wiki/35034
- Every identification you make reduces the “competition” and makes your own observations slightly more likely to get identified by someone else :)