Taking identifications to a new level: the Identification Center

I tried to collect some resouces here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/online-nature-courses-symposia-theme-days-lectures-events/51460/6
Unfortunately it is closed again, but if there are some people that would like to contribute, we could ask an admin to open it up again - I also have a few new resources in mind.

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That’s called the Peterson System! It is the reason I have always preferred Peterson Field Guides to the ones that use photographs.

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Thanks all for these recent replies. Good to see this idea still excites new people. From the various replies it remains clear to me that people here on iNat do not lack the willingness or capacity to help document and train others to identify. There is so much written between journal posts, external sites, in comment boxes of observations… I really believe that if we were to capture and present this information in a more structured manner, it would go a long way in bringing in more people to help with identification!

PS please vote for this idea if you believe it has merit - would be great to see if we could get the team at iNat to consider this!

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I’m not sure I would support all the details of the proposal in the original post, but I think it is important for iNat to provide better support for both finding resources and facilitating IDer collaboration than is currently the case.

In this context, I can think of some useful smaller changes that would build on existing functionality rather than creating an entirely new interface.

There are already a lot of fantastic user-created ID resources on iNat. The problem is that they are scattered across personal journal posts and projects that are difficult to find or search for systematically.

So one thing that I think would make a huge difference would be improving the searching and browsing options for journal posts and projects. Currently it is not possible to search journal posts at all, and the search function for projects is very rudimentary and often quite frustrating.

First, adding a way to associate a journal post with one or more taxa, similar to the way a project can be associated with particular taxa. It would then be possible to search for journal posts or projects about a particular taxon. A link could be added to taxon pages that would take users to a list of journal posts that include that taxon (I think here it would need to be exact matches, not including child taxa).

Second, creating categories for journal posts – i.e., “identification guide”, “update”, “announcement”, “event”, “links and resources”, etc. Since journal posts have many different purposes, this would make it possible to sort out those that probably aren’t relevant to a particular query.

Third, adding a way to associate journal posts with a place, so that it would possible to filter journal posts for a combination of three parameters: taxon, ID guide, place. I guess for places including smaller units within a larger place would probably make sense (e.g. if I search for a city I would also get results for the state).

This would also be useful for other purposes, such as helping users to find announcements about events or bioblitzes in their area.

The advantage to this is that it would be automatic – if the journal posts or projects have been labelled appropriately, they would be automatically added to the list of resources available from the taxon page. It would not need to be manually curated. (This would no doubt mean that not all items would be equally useful, because there would be no quality control mechanism, but my impression is that the overall quality of journal posts is fairly good.)

The other thing that I miss is that there is no good way for IDers to have group discussions on iNat itself. Essentially the only option right now is to use the comments in journal posts, which I find rather unwieldy, since there are no automatic formatting options and comments are not threaded. Or the IDers all have to agree to use some external platform (chat, videoconference, e-mail etc.) for such discussions, which adds extra complications to collaboration rather than removing them.

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Just to mention this is what I currently do support IDying in a practical way:

I am collection ressource I use: Online Resources I Regularly Use · iNaturalist

I set up a project for observations that include idenfication aid:
01 Bestimmungshilfen - Identification Aid · iNaturalist

(I startet with a bunch, but I changed my mind. Dachprojekt Bestimmungshilfen · iNaturalist)

From time to time I create guides eg: Guides finden · iNaturalist

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Because they are both public you can use Google Search
I tried ‘identify pines inaturalist’ and found some.

Going to an external website to search iNat is neither efficient nor convenient. It also means that there is no way to optimize the search for relevance using the existing structures of iNat (for example, Google cannot differentiate between a word merely being used in a project description and a taxon that is the focus of that project). The current project search on iNat is fairly useless for many keywords for this precise reason.

It’s a bit like using Google to perform a fulltext search of a library catalogue instead of having a catalogue search that distinguishes between information stored in fields for titles, authors, keywords, and summaries.

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I agree with the sentiment that while there are ways to dig up existing information on how to ID, it is far from user-friendly. I think a lot of people that could be ID’ing are put off by the fact that there is quite a threshold to digging into iNat and trying to unpack the scattered info. And like you say @spiphany there is already a taxon classification system as well as a Places system. Both of these are hierarchical, and well-embedded in iNat.

While my original proposal is indeed quite detailed, I would also strongly support your suggestions of starting with tagging resources using taxon and place so that you can then very easily filter for this. The accessibility would greatly improve. And so many efforts that are currently tucked away somewhere hidden in iNat would reach a much wider audience.

Agreed on the lack of a place for discussion (hence the suggestions around having direct links between the Identification Center and the forum, and also encouraging people to announce (online) events which can then have some sort of a discussion place, be it in the forum or elsewhere).

Many thanks for the input!

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Certainly very much easier for me to find things on my blog, than to dig thru my journal posts on iNat.
Battle to find info that I know I read from iNat staff, somewhere in their blog posts or on the forum!

Someone suggested an extra tab on the taxon pages - to list journal posts for ID help. That would be a straightforward way to find the right one.

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I would love to see the ability to tag identification resources by place and taxa, and then find those resources by looking at the taxa page filtered by place. Whether that’s journal posts, links, or uploaded documents, all would be helpful.

It can be disorienting and exhausting to try to scour the web for information, as it involves a lot of sifting through resources that are decades out of date with taxonomies that don’t align with modern ones or with iNaturalist; that focus on your taxa of interest but on a different continent; or just dealing with the fact that search engines are overly nonspecific about their results, and will return many results targeted at use cases other than identification (I’ve often tried to find information on a given taxa only to instead find a lot of search results about pest control measures for destroying or removing said taxa, for example).

If it were possible for people to upload, link, or journal identification resources and specify their place and taxa, that would make it worlds easier to find these resources.

Also more broadly, I think centralized starting places for people who want to start IDing more consistently would be very helpful for a lot of folks.

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