Prolific identifiers: how do you filter for observations to ID?

General
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Over in the thread on the pros and cons of adding coarse identifications, people are debating how expert and/or prolific identifiers are filtering to find the observations they work on. This is a thread for such IDers to talk about how they filter. I’ll be arbitrary here and define prolific identifiers as those with more than 5,000 IDs made for other people.

Note that this is NOT about the mechanics of how to use the Filter tool or how to construct a useful URL; this is soliciting information from identifiers about what factors go into filtering. Such factors might be: For what rank or ranks (Kingdom to Species) do you normally filter? How big an area do you work in - state/province, country, continent, world-wide? Do you work on plants or animals or fungi or (bless you!) another Kingdom? And any other factor I’m not thinking of right now.

I’ll go first, but please feel free to not follow my example, if that seems useful to you. I am a prolific identifier (around 247,000 IDs for others), but not an expert in anything. I focus mostly on the New England region of the United States, but I often branch out to cover much of eastern US and Canada. I work generally on plants, but often ID other taxa. Currently, I filter at the species or genus level for common and easy-to-ID taxa, because I am trying to move as many observations as possible to Research Grade, while also giving as many observers as possible feedback on their observations.

I used to put quite a bit of time into identifying Unknowns, both in my local region and world-wide, but that is often a slower process for me, so I’ve mostly turned to working on observations already at the Species or Genus level.

Edited to Add: I just realized, after reading through everyone’s replies, that I often just look at unfiltered Needs ID observations for my region and add IDs or annotations where I can. So I’m not always filtering for specific species or genera.

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The vast majority (over 95%) of my ~348,000 IDs are of Australian observations. Whilst there are definitely a number of specific groups that I have the most expertise in IDing (eg plants and seashells), I am comfortable IDing most taxa as long as they are Australian, and so am largely a geographic specialist

Thus, in most cases (unless I am specifically working on cleaning up a particular group, or in the mood for working on a specific taxon that day), I generally just use a single filter to make IDs: Australia (or to be more accurate, a bookmarked filter that combines 6 places that, together, represent Australia, its waters and its external territories: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6744,7333,7616,10287,10293,118147)

I very very rarely set any rank filters and am happy to identify obs starting at any rank

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I mostly do moths of the eastern USA and Canada, about 225,000 IDs so far. If I’m IDing a part of the country I haven’t done for a while, I usually start with the filter showing only order-level IDs (obs sitting at Lepidoptera), then when those are finished I reduce the filter level 1 clade at a time until I reach species. I figure stuff with no ID past “moth” is a priority, and stuff that already has a species suggestion is lowest priority, since about 95% of them will be correct and it’s more a matter of seeking out the misidentifications.

When I get to the species-level IDs if find more than one misidentified ob with the same species suggestion with the CV icon, I open a new tab and broaden the map filter to the whole continent and search for that species in particular. This usually yields a rich set of CV misidentifications to correct- once the CV gets an incorrect idea of what a species looks like, it tends to suggest the same wrong ID many times. I also have a list of about a dozen moth species in the eastern Nearctic that the CV consistently suggests incorrectly, and I check those every few weeks to bump them all back. In these cases, I include RG in the filter, because there tend to be plenty of these mistakes that get an “agree” vote.

For taxa than I ID outside of the eastern USA and Canada, I usually filter one location or date range at a time. for example, if I’m IDing Acrolophus that are sitting at genus, I’ll Filter to Florida and have “Acrolophus walsinghami” on my clipboard to paste since that’s what most of them are going to be. Then I’ll filter to the Northeast and October and have “Acrolophus mora” on the clipboard to paste, since that’s mostly what’ll be there. For date-restricted species, I’ll filter to all dates when the species shouldn’t be flying and have some higher taxon copied since I’ll probably be kicking most of them back to a higher level.

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Interesting question, Lynn. Personally, I have a couple different approaches depending on my mood at any given moment.

  1. I have a small number of genera of moths on which I’ve published; I routinely Identify all observations of those as best I can down to species. These are taxa I’m subscribed to, but I’ve found that just filtering for them in Identify mode is pretty efficient, so I typically filter by genus and “North America”.
  2. At other times, since I know most of the biota of my home turf pretty well, I will leave off any taxon filter and focus an Identify season on anything in Travis County or Texas. In sessions of this type, there are large segments of Life that I just skip over because I either don’t know them well or I am aware that there are other taxonomic experts on iNat for the groups. So I skip over fungi, herps, and insect groups such as flies and beetles, for instance. This leaves me with lots of birds, mammals, and Lepidoptera which I can race through with some confidence and move many/most usable imagery to species level. I use the “Mark as reviewed” button generously for observations I skip over so that I don’t have to look at them repeatedly.
  3. If I really want to race through a lot of IDs that need help, among those taxa for which I feel most qualified, I’ll just go through “Birds” and “Texas”, or “Lepidoptera” and “Travis County”.

Just as a personal preference, I tend not to work at higher taxonomic levels (e.g., moving things from Unknown to Plants, etc.). There’s so much to do at lower levels that I leave that task to other eager identifiers.

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I almost always filter to my region, the Salish Sea and identify what I can from there. Sometimes I’ll add an additional filter for lepidoptera. I find sticking to IDing in my region helps prime my brain for what I can expect to see on my local hikes.

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OK, I’m going to out myself now. i don’t know if I am a “prolific” IDer, I have around 8500 IDs, which is a bit less than half of my observations. It took me quite a while to build up my confidence to ID anything at all. I tried IDing unknowns, though reading the forum with all those words like ploughing, working, chewing… didn’t sound like fun. And it wasn’t. I got a few stupid remarks like: “duh, I thought it was a dinosaur”. I also didn’t realise for a long time that you have those suggestions. I thought: “Oh, CV not working. Fair enough, they don’t want iDers just putting in CV suggestions”. So my IDs were very broad. Sometimes when I thought, I know this, but don’t remember the name, I had to click on view anyway. Now I mainly ID what appears on my dashbord, I have subscribed to Andalucia and there I can occasionally get something from unknown to species. While I’m on that observation anyway I often mark annotations or explain how to differentiate. I even recognise some plants now. Sometimes if I feel I need to bring up my ID numbers I sort mollusks into bivalvia and gastopods worldwide (though that isn’t as straightforward as I thought it was.)

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I go to the explore tab and type in what I want to ID. I often use the location box to reduce the number of observations I’m looking through. And then I click the box needs ID in the filters box. This way it limits what I’m looking at to what I know and can possibly ID. I also follow certain taxa my home tab that I will ID also.

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I have 22,116 ID’s, so I’m not as prolific as the others in this thread, but I’m above the 5,000 ID threshold so I’ll take it :)

I do the same thing for Champaign County and Illinois. Mostly as a break from specialist-identifying. Even if I hardly anything about plants, fungi, or animals globally, I can identify most things to species locally. It’s also nice to go through local unknowns, as I can identify those to species fairly easily, saving some work for those who add broader ID’s globally :)

When I’m not identifying locally, I’m certainly going through Class Bivalvia globally, just to look over the new observations and to catch any disagreements or rare species not identified past class. After I’m done combing through those observations, I go through more specific taxa like to family or species to find observations I may have missed.

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My typical pattern is starting with Yellowstone Ecosystem Unknowns. Then I do Yellowstone Ecosystem plants above family. Then I look at all Yellowstone Ecosystem plants (most of these will be at species or genus from CV). Sometimes I just review the mix of plants and ID the ones I know. More often, I pick something I know that is on the first page and search for that family, genus, or species in the area, so I can add IDs to a few pages of related plants.

In the off season, I expand to all of Wyoming, then Montana, then Idaho.

Having skimmed the other thread, I feel it is useful to point out, that I got my start by adding coarse IDs to Unknowns. I would guess that for plants >75% of my plant IDs this year in the Yellowstone Ecosystem are now family or more specific.

Also while the %Needs ID goes up in the summer, since I have been doing this, each year it is less by the start of Spring.

Edit: spelling and grammar error

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I am a specialist in one family of beetles, so I have an easy way: I routinely go for that family, hoping that somebody else has done the first, second, … pass for me.
Usually it works well: most of the Melyridae get caught by users screening observations of beetles, and the majority of the identifications as such are indeed the right family. Thanks a lot for that…

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8500 IDs is substantial!

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I appreciate that we each approach this differently, that we can work with each other.

I need some easier chunks to start my daily IDs.
Mavericks - the ones that have slipped thru my Notifications.
Plant Conflicts in Africa (sigh of relief, often nothing to do here)
Kingdom Disagreements in Africa (these are either obvious, or flee from WAY out of my league!)

Plant IDs above family on the Cape Peninsula (since I whine about these, I need to resolve what I can)
Cape Peninsula Unknowns (my here and now so reasonably easy)
I rue the day I realised that Needs ID are waiting too.

I may even get to Western Cape, and the Rest of Africa (not South Africa in other words) Fascinated to follow the discussions to an ID of … who knew the world is covered in dancing flies?!

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I basically only identify observations by people I follow now. Anything beyond that has become completely unmanageable because of the shear volume of users and observations.

Occasionally I’ll pick a taxon and curate it. Usually if I see lots of extralimital/disjunct observations that are clearly wrong.

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When I do high level sorting of Plantae it’s only on old stuff. I change to ascending but then I skip to like page 50 to skip over the really hard stuff that I want to look at again later when I have time to crack open some books. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?page=50&order=asc&taxon_id=47126&lrank=epifamily Usually in my default location, Southeast TX. Sometimes narrow it down to just my local area (to avoid Houston). Sometimes I do Louisiana. Less frequently I’ll do somewhere else in the American Southeast. I try to get it down to Family. Sometimes I recognize stuff that I can get down to species (or genus).

I follow my county and genus Taxodiomyia (galls on baldcypress). If I see in my feed someone has a lot of photos of plants from nature preserves in my county, I often will go to their profile then look at their observations and put a box around those in this area because there are more preserves in nearby counties that people will also visit while they are in this area.

I also go on sprees of working on commonly confused species (most recently on Eastern Cottontail vs Swamp Rabbit including finding incorrect RG obs). With some of these the confusion is between closely related species so I just set my search to the subtribe, genus, or subgenus that they are both in. Sometimes they are totally unrelated so I have to make a URL like this one and then bookmark it. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?ident_taxon_id=48625&without_taxon_id=48625&lrank=family&place_id=any This one is for the common confusion of Pinkladies (Oenothera speciosa) with various similar looking pink flowers.

I also sometimes work on Pre-mavericks and the Unknown Yellow projects. For the Unknown Yellow projects I pick plant ones where I know I can tell whether the CV is correct in the suggestion of family/tribe/etc even if I don’t know the species in other areas.

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I do every velvet ant I can find here. The most useful tool is switching the Reviewed filter to “no”. Then I try to check every observation of the family each day and if there are more than about 50 available, I use the map to narrow things down a bit at a time. After a few weeks of field work and other job duties, I have about 2500 to catch up on, but the reviewed filter makes sure I don’t miss any.

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Can’t say thank you enough for Kevin’s IDs. Did y’all know he cowrote a field guide and identifies insects for a living at CA department of food and ag?

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I filter for Plants in my Region (Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur) with priority on Unknown and, at the moment, Cardueae.

Additionally I filter for Unknown in Europe that were added before Aril 1st 2024.
The reason for the cut-off date is that I don’t like open ended tasks - 8553 observations to identify seems to be manageable.

The main system related issue I have, is the inability to exclude
a) perfectly identified observations of non-iconic taxa like bacteria [edit: my bad… this is actually possible]
b) perfectly well identified observations where the OP opted out of community IDs

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that is an issue @jeanphilippeb and I have battled with.
iNat will not allow identifiers to filter out Opted Out. The observer has won that battle.

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You can filter for observations without an ID by adding &identified=false to the url or via this project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/unknowns-and-state-of-matter

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Mea culpa, you are right and it’s even in my filter ;-)