I am grateful to so many things about iNaturalist, and especially for the dedication of expert identifiers. But I wanted to take a moment to observe generalist identifiers who are careful with their IDs and especially their confirmatory IDs.
It is so helpful to narrow things down just a little, and it warms my heart when I see an ID moving step-by-step from general arthropods → millipedes → Genus or plants → dicots → Ericaceae → Rhododendron. IDers who do this not only make iNat more efficient but learn a lot about what they do and don’t know.
Thanks to everyone who is helping to build this community and their stewardship of our shared world.
I love that dropping a general ID onto something which I don’t know much about will automatically subscribe me to notifications when someone posts a more specific ID.
So I automatically get to learn what that might be, when someone else who knows more than me gets to it.
Sometimes when I’m identifying Unknowns, the best I can do is something like Insects or Dicots and I feel a little incompetent. But then I think, “No one is born knowing what an insect or dicot is,” and I realize that maybe I’m educating observers about the taxonomic levels about species and that’s OK to add IDs that aren’t at species levels.
I recently saw something identified as a true crab, even though only a tiny bit was visible, the rest hidden by the shell of some mollusk. I disagreed, putting it in Anomura, which contains the hermit crabs. Sagecrab came along and identified it precisely.
If something looks crabby, I usually just call it a decapod, unless it’s wearing a mollusk shell.
We each have our list of - Broadly Right - where we are confident - and notifications roll in from Our taxon specialists. Will vary by location, and our own skills and interests.
Apart from 2 pairs of legs per segment in millipede - I am now working on ‘looks like an earthworm’ put it in Crassiclitellata (I can remember clitellum not sure what crassi might be)
I’m new to iNat. I really enjoy watching the ID narrow down. There are very few things I’m completely confident in IDing. Even that number is dwindling as I ID things and someone corrects me. It can be hard sometimes to maintain the confidence in ID but I remind myself the same the OP does. Not everyone knows how the classification system works. Is a butterly Lepidoptera? Are they under insecta? The answer is yes.
As someone who can do great IDs from less-than-stellar microscopy in only one small group of rarely posted subset of diatoms, but otherwise spends time looking through old unknowns to give “plant”/“arthropod”/“fungi” IDs (and the occasional “Life”), this makes me feel a lot better about the IDs I’m doing. (I also get kind of a kick out of how much I can know about one part of biology and absolutely nothing about others.)
iNat is a constant learning curve. Discovering what you didn’t know you didn’t know. A new taxon specialist lands on iNat and tidies up their chosen slice, and we tag along and learn a little bit more. Send that obs their way in future.
I have waded in the unknown pool for years and have learned a great deal from every basic ID I added. The way iNat works means that everyone can benefit by learning from others regardless of how much they know. I love that!
I also wanted to note that one doesn’t have to just ID “unknowns” to refine IDs, see the second section of this help page. I personally go through things stuck at Arthropoda and Arachnida and try to refine those.
A few years doing coarse IDs on iNat ended up being the gateway to excelling in some of my plant biology courses and ultimately learning a bit about keying and identification!
It taught me some of the basics of plant taxonomy, it made me follow observations that later got refined, which taught me which features were diagnostic, and it helped train my eye. Though not an expert in anything by any means, general IDs were the stepping stone that got me from total newbie to regular identifier in my area
Once I formally learned about some of the families in my area, I was already familiar with many of the features due to time spent making broad identifications despite not knowing what those features were called. (For example, the familiar “shape” of many mints is called a verticilaster [and the square stems were a useful feature and not a coincidence!], the interesting chickweed “branching” I’d noted was actually a type of inflorescence called a dichasial cyme that is typical of their family, and those “bell” or “cup” shaped flowers that I’d noticed was common in the Ericaceae are called “urceolate”).
I still do coarse IDs, especially for organisms I know less about, like insects, birds and many fungi and it only became clear to me how helpful that is once I got to where I was searching through those tags myself!
iNaturalist is like a mega group project, and without everyone’s contributions (such as the generalist IDers, the observers, the curators, the taxon experts, the volunteers and staff, and everyone else involved) it wouldn’t be anywhere near what it currently is