Genius!
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Is there a general consensus on marking >1 year old observations with multiple species as " Based on the evidence, can the Community Taxon still be confirmed or improved? > No, it’s as good as it can be" ?
You could definitely knock out a fair number of the 6.5K pages with that…
Hoping that we edge closer to some new DQA options for the problem children.
Life + life + good as can be = Casual.
But. That is not allowed.
If you mean observations with one photo of a bug, another of a bird, another of a plant, etc., then the official instructions are to do just that (after giving the observer a few days to split the observation).
FAQ: What do I do if the observation has multiple photos depicting different species?
@DianaStuder are you talking about duplicate observations?
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I’m working on Kalanchoe subg. Bryophyllum right now, and I’m at 0 unreviewed observations. Now I’m going through all of the old Kalanchoe observations to find Bryophyllum that never got ID’d down past genus. I think I’m the top identifier of verifiable observations in that subgenus now. Kalanchoe × houghtonii, Kalanchoe delagoensis, and Kalanchoe daigremontiana are almost always misidentified by Computer Vision, and since many of them are by beginners that only ever post a few times, they get stuck at subg. Bryophyllum until myself and a couple of other Bryophyllum identifiers come along and make a bunch of Mavericks. To make things worse lots of beginners also participate in the agree button dogpile effect, making it virtually impossible for the observations to ever achieve research grade. Hopefully the ~1,700 needs ID Bryophyllum observations will someday achieve research grade
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I think there are enough people putting basic ID’s on unknowns that slowly but surely the amount is going down.
FYI the CV is currently set up so that it cannot suggest hybrids, hence houghtonii being misIDed by the CV (literally impossible for it to correctly ID it)
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Outright duplicates (uploaded as 2 obs)
One individual - field marks scattered across many obs
Multiple species to be split
The problem obs that can only be resolved by the observer
the state of matter life observations really are a hard mode boulder. I’ve definitely seen a lot of your IDs as I’ve been looking to identify stuff though and I get the feeling you’ve made a pretty significant dent in the number of them
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Thanks @dhasdf ! I hadn’t realized that was the advised policy.
Thanks for confirming this!! I was almost positive that that was the case. It makes sense for almost every other natural hybrid since most of them are fairly rare, but for these Kalanchoes x houghtonii is probably the most common of the three worldwide, other than maybe K. delagoensis.
:) very poetic
In that boulder link I gave above, I believe I have placed all the multispecies items within the set into this project and added 1 person’s worth of clicks for them. It generally takes 1 more person to send them to Casual from there.
For ease of finding them during my workflow, I usually label these photosets at Life, even if they are all visible as dicots or something. The second person can add a finer common denominator as they like.
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That’s a good thing. Sometimes it seems that everything on iNat will sooner or later be called a hybrid, so it’s just as well to not automate that inevitability.
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I don’t know what data you are basing this conclusion on. Many, many IDers (and taxonomists) recognize that species may have intraspecific morphological variation without proposing that they are hybrids or a taxon split is necessary.
With plants, the exclusion of hybrids from the CV is actually an issue that prevents it from making accurate suggestions for numerous taxa.
One example is Medicago x varia (Medicago sativa x falcata), which is quite widespread here in Europe – and at least in and around settlements, probably more common than the non-hybrid forms. I suspect the Kalanchoe × houghtonii situation may be similar.
Here the CV does at least recognize the genus, but there are some fertile ornamental hybrids that frequently escape cultivation and the CV completely fails here because the flowers look so different than the wild relatives. So it suggests things that are only vaguely similar and not in any way closely related. A couple of common culprits that I see are Viola × wittrockiana / Viola × williamsii and Erysimum x cheiri.
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I’ve been working a lot on refining observations stuck at class Arachnida, inspired by @dhasdf’s post here. There are a lot of egg sacs that I don’t feel confident identifying, but it’s been nice knocking a lot of observations down to order or below and seeing folks like @paolosol and @huttonia identify them further. I only have about 2k class Arachnida observations unreviewed by me, which is exciting.
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Great job! Always nice to get more help with our eight-legged friends 
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I just went through one user’s observations – all six pages of Needs ID – and counted three unrelated taxa that had been either bumped back or commented “it looks to me like a hybrid with…” That’s just six pages of one user’s observations. And none of them were the usual suspects of oaks, peafowl, ducks, gulls, or marmosets, nor were any of them garden cultivars.
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“iNaturalistly speaking” - what a great neologism!
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honestly, you answered your own question before asking it. people are too hesitant to label domestic horses as przewalski’s because they think feral = wild, and therefore every mustang in the western U.S. is a wild horse (yes, as in przewalski’s). because there are so few przewalski’s horses, it’s important to let these individuals know that the chances of their equine observation being that species is very, very slim.
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