Hello! I’m relatively new to iNat and 90% of the time I only use it to post observations and wait for other people to ID for me. I’ve started identification just recently for Unknowns as an exercise, but I’m very much still learning the ins and outs of iNat’s identification system.
Sometimes you come across observations that have community taxon bumped to a very coarse taxa like ‘Life’ because of disagreeing IDs. The conflicting IDs can be very specific (species/genus level). In this case would it be valuable to add a coarser ID (for example, class-level) that agrees with one side, or is it considered downgrading an ID and is better to leave it alone?
Yes – always add an ID to the best of your knowledge, for Kingdom Disagreements at Life.
Unless the wrong ID is withdrawn, or reconsidered – the CID Community Taxon algorithm will need 5 to agree. 1 wrong + 1 Hard DISagreement, then ‘more than 2/3’ = 5. We need all hands on deck vs the algorithm.
Disagreements trapped at Kingdom (or Life) 176.6K (filter to your preferred Location, or Kingdom, or by Date or Annotation ?)
Often easy to at least help to move them to a better / finer ID.
Since my preferred filters are set to Date Observed and Ascending, this from 1969 is first (but only uploaded this June, so has NOT waited long) … Order … https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/370897198
IDing is fun! I tend to leave things alone when I don’t know enough about the organism to agree to the same level, but I don’t think it hurts to add a coarser ID - as long as you don’t hard disagree with the lower one, and keep an eye on your mavericks in case you’ve made a mistake.
Anything you can do to help the ID move in the right direction is great. If something is at Life, even putting it in the right kingdom makes it more likely people who can help move it further will see it. I occasionally look at such disagreements but in general only look at things that are at least called plants, so until someone gets it into ‘my’ kingdom, I won’t be able to help.
Having said that, you will occasionally come across identifiers who don’t seem to understand how the system works and may complain about your IDs. At that point you have the choice to (1) ignore them, (2) try to explain why you’re doing it - some people are open to that, some really don’t seem to be, or (3) withdraw - which doesn’t help anything but I guess semi-avoids conflict. I do a mix of 1 and 2, though there are occasional identifiers who I’ll sometimes avoid ‘helping out’ an observation if they’ve previously identified, just because I get sick of dealing with the complaints.
She’s bringing Ancestor Disagreements into the equation - disagreeing to kingdom level if the lowest common level was, say, class, effectively means that the initial disagree-er is disagreeing with the correct ID and needs extra IDs to overcome that (so 1 incorrect ID plus one Ancestor Disagreement requires 5 correct IDs).
I add lots of coarse IDs if it will help improve the current community ID. If an observation has: insect > spider > jumping spider, the community ID is “arthropod”. I’ll ID as spider, and now the community ID is “spider”. I’m not disagreeing with the jumping spider ID, it’s just not a level I’m comfortable IDing to, and figure the overall change from arthropod to spider as the community ID is the correct move.
I would just add one caveat for the OP - be aware that some Kingdom disagreements result from disagreements about which organism to identify in a photograph. Is it the insect gall, or the plant hosting it? For example.
In these cases, if the observer has made it clear through their own ID or a comment which organism is the focus, that choice should be honored.
If there is no clear indication, it is best to @ ask the observer what their focus is, before adding a coarse ID that may be on the path not intended by the observer.