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?”
Yes, but since they come up again and again, can’t an effort be made to address some of them up front? After I made the post I kept thinking about drawing up a map of iNat like the algorithm maps with squares and arrows and writing in the entrances and exits. Lots of visual learners out there. I would be willing to do a draft if anyone else thinks it would be helpful. And we could even have a beginners scavenger hunt to help people learn about iNat once they arrive here.
I like my explanations in words.
But visual and graphic to reach different people, sounds good.
And anything to make the first where what how a little easier would be wonderful. So much info at first sight, but, the bit you want is tucked away on an informed journey.
It’s a pretty common general human experience to the point where it’s associated with a cognitive bias, the frequency illusion: “after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has an increased frequency of occurrence”. I doubt that many people come away thinking that suddenly there are more of a particular organism around (unless one is in the middle of a population boom). Nonetheless, it’s incredible how oblivious we can be to many of the organisms around us.
Also Serendipity. Right time, right place. IDing flowering plants in my here and now, or a little further away - means that I recognise, seen that, it is …
I’m sure that works fine for some, but one of my main uses for iNat is to keep my own archive of photos up to date with the correct ID, so I really need to know when my initial ID is either confirmed or rectified. I use my photos for presentations and on websites, so for me it’s important that the IDs are as accurate as possible. I did try (really!) for a couple of weeks, but I kept missing the important stuff and trying to manage the notifications just used up too much of what little time I had available. Filters would be such a big help and I for one (and I’m sure I’m not alone) would be delighted to do more identifying if the issue could be resolved. I do so hope improvements are on the way.
But it’s not what they are saying. We all are checking notifications for our own observations, but there’re not more or less of them if you’re iding, if you find it hard to see them between other notifications (though look at the end where it says “yours”, it’s easy to spot those), you can use the app where everything done with your observations is separated and easy to look through.
I think it’s important for people to remember many people are not into identifying they just love nature and they’re not into the science like other people are we need to just embrace everybody’s contribution
Using time of other people who id your stuff as volunteers, it’s only natural to pay back a little, there’s no need to have a background, just iding something simple is enough.
There is no obligation for anyone to ID anything though. When I sit down to ID a bunch of things, I don’t necessarily do it as a favor for other people, so I don’t expect others to return the favor. It’s not a chore, I just like doing it. It’s just as much fun as say playing a computer game but happens to be more productive because it contributes to an online database of knowledge, and as an added bonus I learn stuff by doing it.
You don’t need to do anything as a favor? It’s stil lthe fact people are unpaid & spending literal days on that. Getting as many people to iding as possible is one of the solution to needs id problem, that is mentioned every time it’s discussed, for many, many years. So, I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove here, we should ask as many people as possible to id, explain that it’s not scary, etc. Yet to hear anyone saying how they hate ever doing ids.
What I’m trying to say is that we all decide what we want to spend our time on, and maybe the narrative should focus more on how much fun it is and other benefits of being an identifier if we want to attract more people to doing this. Sometimes I feel these discussions slip into trying to make people feel guilty of wasting identifiers’ time, which may just make people uncomfortable about using iNaturalist if they don’t feel confident in contributing IDs. But really each person is responsible for their own time management, including those who identify.
Oh, I don’t think here we meant to guilt trap people into iding, there’re many reasons and pluses (for yourself) listed in topics focused on iding, I just wanted to say we shouldn’t “leave alone” a user if they never ided anything, we can talk to them and describe how cool that is, and then it’s for them to decide, most users are just not aware that there’s a need for ids they’re already capable of.
I would do a lot more id except I find platform very user unfriendly .can’t see details of tiny photos and much other confusion for me, becomes to much work. if i nat corrects this i would do a lot of ids
could you explain this a bit more? eg where are you seeing the tiny photos? If you use iNat on the desktop, you can view photos at literally full screen size. Are you making IDs via your phone? What are some of the other areas of confusion for you? It’s difficult to resolve the issue for you without details
I open each obs before I ID it. I want to see any notes or placeholder text. Also if there are multiple photos … are they all the same species or does it need a copypasta to Split Please. Or the other copypasta Please Combine Multiple pictures of the same thing.
Absolutely cannot ID from teensy thumbnails. You can zoom in. The confusion is a learning curve. I remember it took me about a year to settle in comfortably. And the learning curve is ongoing!
