Rather make the ID at the level where you are confident.
Not sure if it is That beetle ??
ID as beetles and leave That beetle in a comment.
My most rewarding IDs are when I cautiously say beetle or spider, and the taxon specialist I respect agrees with me, at that high level. So it is not my lack of knowledge, there is not enough info in the obs.
Thatâs pretty much how I do it. If the CV suggestion has pictures and a description that really seem similar to mine, Iâll use it. I try to keep it to middle ground categories, not this specific species, but something that narrows it down a little more than the entire animal kingdom. Maybe anyone can post an id, but only some trusted or expert userâs id contributes to research grade status? I donât know anything about software design, so I have no idea how practical it would be to implement. Honestly, I donât even understand how this ends up being used for the scientific part. I just think that it might be a good idea to try to keep the research grade status accurate.
In earlier discussions iNat has said they will not introduce âexpertâ IDs.
So we need other solutions.
ID as best you confidently can, and follow your notifications so you can withdraw or reconsider as appropriate.
I donât know, since some people might be great at ID-ing mosses or birds or whatever, and since they are so specialized, they donât meet the requirements or something, even though they are invaluable to the community.
Maybe it could be something that isnât even seen on the user end? Can the people who use the research grade data have options to confirm the accuracy of an id, and correct if needed? Sort of like a final quality control by the experts. Maybe it just corrects it on their end, and could help improve the cv database. Hard to say since Iâm very much not a biologist or programmer. I also seem to have derailed this thread a bit. Sorry moderators.
In response to:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-same-individual-keeps-posting-cv-suggested-misidentifications-on-others-observations-what-do-i-do/54450/23
I agree with your analysis.
About educating the users, I am not sure that this recommendation, without circumstance (and considering the paragraph that comes next), is the right one:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/community+guidelines
This âissueâ has been discussed extensively, and for a long time.
In short:
Encouraging âadding a lot of identificationsâ (indiscriminately and, in particular, coarse identifications) is a strong bias in our way to think about iNaturalist. We need to take a step back from this to allow us to consider other possibilities.
Itâs fine if you donât see doing that as a good use of your time, but I wouldnât extrapolate that to advising others not to. I mostly only try to ID things that Iâve seen personally and have learned a bit about by IDâing them for myself, and most often only in places Iâve seen them - and I will look at something with a coarse ID to see if I can improve it when it shows up among what Iâm filtering for, which rarely includes things languishing at Unknown or Life if Iâm just spending a few minutes picking off some low hanging fruit while Iâm waiting for something else.
Adding a coarse ID IMO isnât about âreducing the number of obs without an IDâ, itâs about getting those obs on the radar of people who might be able to improve it.
I donât see anything in what you highlighted that is encouraging people to add IDs indiscriminately âŚ
I read that first paragraph mostly as a reassurance to new users that if some random comes along and adds an ID to lots of your obs, itâs not because theyâre stalking you, itâs a function of how the site is intended to work.
And the second as âplease donât roll your eyes and say Duhâ when someone improves your Unknown to Something Obvious, because sometimes that Does Help.
Yes! I really appreciate people putting broad and semi-broad IDâs on observations. Because they do this, I can search for the kind of observations I want to see and ID. Please keep it up! â I say both to people who work mainly on broad IDâs and those who will add a broad ID to observations they see while working on other things (e.g. IDing observations in a given area).
I donât see anything specific in what I highlighted, thatâs why I qualify it as indiscriminate: all identifications are encouraged.
Yes, your work is valuable, but how helpful is that coarse ID for you?
Compared to reviewing observations without ID?
Compared to reviewing these bird observations, if you are interested in birds?
They do have that option and they should use it!! Too many researchers assume that RG observations are all correct and then complain when they find that theyâre not. Researchers should at least check the outliers in their datasets!
Well that make my whole idea moot, since it already exists.
Good intentions - but - no. Dumping it in plants takes it out of honest Unknowns where it could be seen. To Plants - which nobody has time for - that is endless!
If I can at least family. Poaceae or Restionaceae or Cyperaceae - then - yes - filters are set and the obs are seen.
It is simple - follow your notifications - which of your IDs draw a response from taxon specialists.
Please, let me suggest you to have a look on these observations without ID and on these observations with a coarse ID. Most of them are likely sedges or grasses, despite none of them are identified at the rank Order or better.
OK. I looked at one page (30 observations each) of each of your suggestions. Found the expected mix of plants that can be IDâd to species, genus, order, or only to Monocot. A couple were dicots, one that I could ID to species. A couple had multiple species. I IDâd them as best I could. So . . . Whatâs your point?
The point is that those batches are lifting out likely grasses.
Instead of you going thru 3 million plants, in the hope of finding grass.
My point is that we donât need coarse IDs to find sedges and grasses.
Moreover, adding coarse IDs (unless it is the best possible ID, for instance for a blurred photo, or a photo showing too few of the organism) takes time and does not [often] help much.
Moreover, adding coarse IDs hides the observerâs placeholder [that is often an ID at the level species or genus] and ends up in getting it lost forever.
So, I was somehow responding to your encouragement for adding coarse IDs.
If you prefer a more specific filter, try for example these observations without ID or these observations with a coarse ID that are likely in Tribe Cypereae.
For entry points, see the âAboutâ section of this project to get the âIdentifyâ links and to browse the sub-projects:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/unknown-poales
Your projects are not integrated into iNatâs infrastructure. For better or for worse, most IDers are going to be sorting based on the ID attached to the observation. For this to happen, they need broad IDs. In addition, IDers often need to look at observations with broad IDs anyway because this is where observations end up if they are given a broad ID by observers (often using the buttons for iconic taxa) or if there are disagreements that result in the observations ending up at a high level.
If you donât find that adding broad IDs is a good use of your time, that is fine. Other users may find it interesting to do so. I know I have learned a lot from looking at observations with broad IDs like Arthropoda or Pterygota. I donât see how it is useful to anyone to discourage users from contributing by adding broad IDs.
It also seems to me that this is taking us very far from the topic of the thread. I would rather have inexperienced users helping out by adding broad IDs (with or without the help of the CV to get an idea of what it might be) â which often do, in fact, help observations get seen by observers â than by selecting the top CV suggestion to ID other peopleâs observations.
I see. I usually avoid âlifeâ and âunknownâ observations because so darn many of them are bacteria or mud or detritis or algae that donât fit in easy categories. The two sets you show really do have a lot of Poales.
So . . . I think my time is better spend identifying other things, but whatâs wrong with someone sorting these into more useful broad categories? Especially someone who doesnât feel confident making many species-level IDâs?
(Except the loosing the placeholder thing, but (1) itâs easy enough to prevent that loss by copying the placeholder into the comment when I add an ID and (2) this is something iNaturalist really should fix.)
Itâs the difference between seeing a concise list of things I might have some confidence to ID, and having to scroll through pages and pages and pages of things Iâve not spent any time becoming that sort of familiar with yet âŚ
⌠which showed me an entire page full of things I could at best only offer an extremely coarse ID for - aside from perhaps the toy biplane on a lawn, which seems to have now already been deleted, for probably the obvious reason.
Which might be interesting for anyone who wants to target âUnknownâ probably-birds, if they could figure out how to craft that url for what they wanted. And if I gather correctly from your journal page, if youâve updated those projects recently? (I donât profess expertise in fully understanding the work youâve done there ⌠it looks interesting, but not exactly user-friendly yet).
Or I could just go to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=Aves with two simple clicks - and spend a few months without ever getting to the end of things that someone has already IDâd to at least âbirdâ but which are not yet at, or at consensus for, species.
Ok, clearly this is another case where the workflows that work very well for some taxa, donât work very well at all for others. Which is fine as long as neither group is insisting their way is the One True Way and everyone else are heretics in need of a good burning.
And yeah, Plants probably is the poster child for a group too big to be very helpful other than keeping those obs off the screens of people who only care about IDâing Animals.
But if you post a clear photo of something you only recognise enough to call it a Fish, youâre probably going to very quickly get it to at least genus. And if you tag it as a nudibranch, it will very likely be at genus or species in somewhere between a few minutes to a few hours.
So why does that not work just as well for things that have already been IDâd to âPlantâ - it seems like it should, or should be able to to me?
