I know it’s redundant, but I just wanted to thank again all the expert identifiers. You’ve slogged through lots of ambiguous or malformed observations, made your best guesses, dealt with really atypical photos, and some of you (a lot of you maybe) are feeling some fatigue. But everything computer vision can do is because of the efforts of you and people like you. The computer vision guesses may not be perfect, but everything they can do, they can do because of your efforts, and they hopefully help you focus your time on the most interesting edge cases. So thank you, redundantly, for all your hard work and dedication. Even if you were to retire now, your meticulous efforts will pay dividends for many years to come. Every success of iNat we owe to your involvement and dedication.
One thing many identifiers don’t realize is that their notes, explanations, ID’s, and comments might guide people in the far future, long after most of us are gone. I think it’s beautiful how scientists, and hobbyists, and many others in between have the opportunity to identify together, to learn together, and to overall contribute to the community!
In case people want to quibble over the word choice: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-expert/19521/
Identification etiquette thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identification-etiquette-on-inaturalist-wiki/1503/
Old related thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identifier-appreciation/25153/
General ways to help on iNat thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ways-to-help-out-on-inat-wiki/1983
And don’t forget to donate (tax deductible) 
Thanks, we do what we can to climb the ever-growing pile!
Agreed. I have a so many favorited observations which hold interesting conversations and information from identifiers, some from before I joined. You never know who else might be reading those journal posts, comments, explanations, etc.
As a full-time college student, I don’t identify as much as I used to just because of the workload I have to manage; it only makes me respect many of our identifiers more for being able to contribute so many IDs apart from the work they already do for a living.
I love that the site allows “learning by doing” with ID’s, and gives an avenue to engage with experts. On many occasions I have noticed something new, asked about it to the experts on iNat, and had papers I wasn’t familiar with sent to me.
Thanks for that! I was interested to put my name into it and discover that I average 79.68 IDs per day, and 21.97 Annotations.
Thanks! That’s interesting.
I know I definitely appreciate when you help me with my observations. I guess it doesn’t happen as often now that I don’t live in VA, but you certainly taught me a lot. So, not just because the computer learns. Because other users learn.
:-)
I am very grateful, too. Expert identifiers and amateurs alike, hundreds of people have put in their time to help ID my observations. I have learned so much here, and my interest in nature has deepened profoundly now that I have a better idea of what I’m looking at. Thank you all.
Agreed! Thanks to all of you!
Thank you. This was really nice to hear. I hope you’re enjoying your new home and learning lots of cool new ecology!
And thank you to identifiers willing to become ‘maverick’.
I realise that this sort of gushing praise isn’t the sort of forum feedback that you’re probably looking for, but I just wanted to say some positive words to thank iNat’s incredible army of identifiers for their hard work and diligence. Over a 120,000 people helped identify our observations in 2024. At least five hundred of these made over 18,000 identifications each - that’s about fifty a day, every day. That is an incredible amount of work. Whether iNaturalist could exist without the work of these people may be open to question, but there is no way that it could give the the same level of service, being a brilliant educational and inspirational tool, without them.
From my own perspective, in my first full year of retirement, I undertook a private challenge in 2024 to observe 100 different bird species every month (perhaps I should have mentioned this on the gamification thread). I’m very pleased to report that I was successful, but there is no way that I would have been were it not for the identifiers here on iNat who confirmed, and sometimes challenged, what I thought I’d seen. Who put labels on things I didn’t have a clue about and who sometimes picked out additional ‘sightings’ in the backgrounds of my photos. In particular, I’d like to thank kakariki14, muhummedh, bonxie62, steve_mcwilliam, lefebvremax, ikelman and steve1984a who each made two-hundred or more IDs on my observations. And @casperrex, @oakleafe and @alanhorstman who, somewhat incredibly, made over a thousand each.
Finally, I feel that I must mention @fregjie, iNat’s most prolific of identifiers last year, whose daily average was well over 1,200 and who clocked up nearly half a million IDs. That is simply amazing.
Thanks all and keep up the good work (please).
Did you allow yourself to duplicate species from month to month, or was that 100 unique species each month?
The identifier statistics available through the Explore page seem to be lagging those reported on iNaturalist’s Global Year in Review page, which reports over 159,000 identifiers, including 25,495 identifiers who did not add any observations of their own!
I’d love to say it was a 100 completely different species every month, but that would require a travel budget far beyond anything I could muster. So every month the clock was re-set and I allowed myself to count the same ones over. In fact 51 of those species were present for all 12 months - I realise that this sounds less than impressive, but it was still a challenge at times.
Oh, that’s definitely still impressive!
I’m not much of a birdwatcher to begin with, and I don’t have a camera with telephoto lens, so I try to avoid posting those “small dot in the distance” photos. Checking my Year in Review summary, I had all of…19 bird observations in total for 2024.
this is my source for 25% of IDs from 130 users