I do - Cape Town, then unknown and recent. Mostly plants because it can be easy to ID something I saw too on this week’s hike.
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The leaderboard exists, but it’s nonsensical. In my county it says you are top at 31 IDs and I am second at 12. What’s that supposed to mean? Why 12 out of the hundreds I have done?
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I usually ID recent observations for a few geographic regions, MD, DC, and “Mid Atlantic States”. I’m a moderatly skilled generalist IDer, so there are a handful of species I can ID really reliably, across a range of taxons. My usual searches are “this region, posted today” or “this reason, IDed as (list of my favorite taxons”.
When I have gone far enough back in those searches that I am not seeing much that I know easily, then I will search for recent unknowns by region, usually from the previous month, but sometimes more recent.
I’ll also periodically revisit “State of matter life cleanup” and see what I can do to sort out fungi/slime molds and sometimes plants.
I’ve also have wondered that. I think that two parts of it are that you provided the initial ID and it has to be IDed down to a certain level. Not sure if it has to make research grade or not. Remove the “iconic_taxa=unknown” to see how you land overall.
Even if it is research grade, that would be sad if only 12 things had gotten there. Pretty sure there’s been at least a dozen each of honey bees, western fence lizards and figeater beatles!
I think there is a time component as well, or that the OP hasn’t given an ID. I don’t follow the leaderboards closely enough to figure out the nuances of it.
Here in Israel, on a typical day, we get fewer than ten new Unknowns… so I often expand my search to the Mediterranean, Middle East, or a random neighbouring country. It’s a good way to get a sample/sense of what grows in the area, and to hone my ID skills.
I like how unpredictable the Unknowns are. Granted three quarters are plants, but I like plants.
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I usually search unknowns after I do my favorite taxa first and then usally on’y 5-10 pages picking the stuff I know or adding coarse ID’s to stuff.
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I used to do more of it, but find I am doing less and less lately. It came to feel like a bit of a shouting into the wind exercise. I just found unless I could essentially do the species ID that a very small percentage ever showed back up on my dashboard to suggest anyone took it further.
I know there are people who filter their ID searches to parameters, and this can help, but it just seems like the ID load is overwhelming the people trying to do it, and you have no way of knowing if there are users doing this filtered search approach in any area.
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Yes, I also got the impression that if at some coarse level id, they don’t count as a leaderboard number- maybe staff can give a description of that?
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I do almost every day! It’s been a huge help in learning what local flora and fauna are. I’ll go into my region(or expand to the whole east coast sometimes) and apply whatever IDs I can recognize. If it’s something coarse I keep an eye on my notifications so if someone narrows it down I can see what it really is and know that for the future. Sometimes if I find a particularly strange or interesting observation I’ll favorite it and check back to see if anyone has ID’d it.
I’ve been learning so much, my friends have started sending me pictures of plants and bugs to identify, since I have a habit now of pointing out species I recognize when we’re out :D (i tried to get them to use iNat but it’s not for everyone unfortunately…)
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Wording in a poll can bias the results of course. I seek out “unknowns” to simply look for things I can easily identify in other areas but not because I “like to add IDs.” Without that phrase, I might have chosen “Always” although I don’t always do so.
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I have a few reasons for hanging out in State of Matter Life. For one, I feel sorry for new users who have stated the organism that is the subject and a bunch of people have ignored their choice, so I want to help straighten it out for them. Another is that I want a good or great photo of an organism to be findable. And a third is that it’s a good random way to see what is going on in the rest of the world. Having said that, I think it would be ideal to figure out ways to keep so much from piling up in the State of Matter Life category in the first place or at least how observations can get out of that category faster. But that would be a different topic . . .
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An interesting thought. My experience goes with what I believe is the usual ID rate of differnt categories. Anything I label as a vertibrate gets snapped up instantly. Sometimes @susanhewitt looks at the molluscs. Insects, usually the bees get ID’d once every so often, and sometimes the beetles, by what looks like a person who searched specifically for them (I see this as a string of similar notifications.) For the plants, even though my area has an expert with huge numbers of identifications given, he seems to operate almost exclusively with the agree button, so he doesn’t usually touch things I wasn’t very specific about. There are two other people who each watch one particular plant family, but otherwise anything above genus doesn’t help a lot.
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Since I feel like my expertise really lies at the intersection of place & habitat, instead of within a specific taxon, I often end up IDing unknowns as I don’t specify a taxon or taxa in the “Identify” tool, just places. It’s one of the main reasons I made the “California coastline & state waters” place, since I can ID most intertidal organisms (to some level or another) along the California coast. So I end up IDing unknowns as part of that process.
The only time I’ll specifically look ONLY for unknowns are after things like terrestrial bioblitzes I help run or for the City Nature Challenge - since I don’t know many terrestrial species, I’ll ID what I can but then move on to the unknowns so I can still help and get those observations to the folks who DO know their terrestrial species!
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Intertidal stuff is why I limit myself to close to home, no coasts to deal with. :)
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I seek out ‘Unknowns’ in two ways:
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From Identify, I go through the Unknown category and add identifications to the lowest taxonomic level I can.
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I follow all the power users in my country and help identify their observations as they show up on my dashboard as well as having a bookmark of all the observations from the country minus the power users. I then periodically go through this bookmarked list to identify anything I can - including Unknowns - welcome new users with the @ tag (to help show them a site feature), and add the observation to projects if applicable.
I tend to interact with Unknown observations more with the second approach than the first but it is fun to see some of the things being observed in other parts of the world. For similar reasons, I also sometimes browse the ‘Real Time Discussions’ tab from the Dashboard to see what is being discussed there. (As well as if I can help with an identification, explanation, etc.)
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The time i am most likely to do this is something like a bioblitz I am helping with. I usually ID plants but if there’s a lot of unknown observations/newbies I will filter for ‘Plants’ and for ‘Unknown’ and if the unknown isn’t a plant I just give it a coarse ID. I almost never just do straight up ‘unknown only’ searches, since I know plants in some areas quite well, it seems more valuable for me to do that.
The other case where I help with unknowns is if i am looking at the all observations map of an area of interest and see them there.
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On occasion I do. My default search is for any taxa in Arizona. After poring over the most recent, I’ll limit it to Tracheophyta in Arizona. For a time some time back, I had reviewed all Tracheophyta in the state. Lately the number of observations has since overwhelmed me. But every so often (once or twice a week) I’ll filter by unknowns from the state.
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