What, why? Doesn’t that flatten the life stage graph, since exuvia can be found at any time? If it’s not EoP:Organism FIRST, why should there be a life stage? Just annotate EoP:Molt!
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Please don’t do this, it’s not accurate because we don’t know which life stage the insect is at (or if it’s still alive) at the date/time of the observation. All the evidence tells us is that the insect molted at some time in the past.
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The CNC for my area [San Francisco] does not include “casual” observations. So that is not an issue here. But I know that a lot of the CNC projects–including Toronto, which I assume is the one you know best–do include casual observations.
La Paz, the 2024 CNC leader by an impressive margin, has nearly 18% of its mind-boggling 150k+ observations in the casual pile. It also, as of May 2 (3 days after the 5/29/2024 close) has less than 4% of observations at RG. Imagine trying to get those 150k observations ID’d. Especially since South America tends to have a higher % of taxa that do not yet have scientific names (“undescribed”) than N. America or certainly than Europe.
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Just an observation about doing identifications. I have noticed over the last year, as my health issues worsen, that I am less inclined to do identifications. I believe this is because identification can be mentally intense and requires a lot of energy, which I no longer have. Given the little energy I do have, I would rather spend it walking across a field looking for bees and flies and other critters as I find that while I am photographing them I forget my other issues for just a moment. I applaud all those doing identifications because it is badly needed and, in my opinion, hard work. Thank you.
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Sorry to hear of your health issues. Enjoy the time in nature. It really is soothing.
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A lot more of La Paz’s observations will be Casual once they are IDed. Last year they had 125,000 observations, of which 48% are Casual, 11% are Research Grade, and 40% are still Needs ID, and probably will remain that way for ever.
I am top of the list of identifiers for La Paz last year (23,000). I did about 3 months of it off and on until I got totally sick of it. I’ve done a couple of thousand so far this year, but I don’t know how much of it I can handle.
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I was ID’ing some worldwide unknowns sorted randomly these past few days and it feels like around 50% of them are from the La Paz area.
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Interesting. I did only some unknowns and most of the spiders I picked out of there seemed to have been from India
Oof. Those are some depressing statistics.
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I would be inclined to agree. I mainly ID fish and holy cow yeah there were a lot. In general I’ve noticed an uptick in observations that I am assuming are students as they have similar usernames and some are taken at a school. Of course, this also results in the absurd IDs such as taking a photo of your friend and IDing it as a naked mole rat. Is this something that happens every year or a relatively new phenomenon? I’d also be curious to hear y’all’s thoughts on the idea that iNat requires at least some sort of an ID for every observation? I think this would be helpful as it increases the chances a specialist will see your observation, and it negates the need for people who sift through ‘unknown’ IDs all day (not to shame them or anything, but I think it would streamline the process). Of course, I haven’t even been on here for 6 months; I’m sure there are a million potential downsides I haven’t considered.
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We have recently acquired that insistent red frame when we upload.
If. The observer knows. What they are looking at. They will add the ID, perhaps as a placeholder - which iNat will graciously destroy when the first ID is added.
Some sort of ID is plants - no, not helpful. I do use ‘fish’ because that gets an active response.
Every year during the City Nature Challenge, new users, usually students, will try stupid tricks, like identifying a person as a naked mole rat. Just ID them as Human and move on.
Every year, there will be pets and potted plants uploaded without marking them as cultivated. Mark them as cultivated and move on.
Every year, there will be observations uploaded without any ID. Add an ID to the best of your ability, even very general IDs, and move on.
These things happen all year long, not just during the CNC. The CNC just brings an enormous volume of new users, some of whom haven’t had enough training in how to use iNat.
Or, if these flawed observations annoy you (they annoy me sometimes!), ignore them and move on without IDing them.
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Filtering some of these “stupid trick” observations like you suggest would seem to be a good job for AI.
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I wouldn’t be opposed to this. iNat’s auto-suggested AI is already pretty good, I would imagine it could certainly help (with human oversight). It would also be nice if AI could detect bones/blood or other gore when uploading an observation and prompt the user to potentially tag as ‘dead’ or ‘bone’ that way those who are sensitive to such things can better filter them out. Nothing like coming across a rotting fish corpse when ID’ing during breakfast ://
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I’ve mentioned this a time or two in the past, but the Korean citizen science site Naturing is set up where users need to pick a taxon icon at upload:
It’s not an ID, but it does make users think about the general category their observation falls within. (On the other hand, the only ID level supported on Naturing is species so the taxon icons are the only way to narrow down a search by taxon.)
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For those who would like to filter out ‘human’ obs
Try this project with 3442 obs
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/unknown-primates
@whaichi plants on iNat 3.25 million
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=8&iconic_taxa=Plantae&order_by=observed_on&order=des&taxon_id=47126&lrank=order&place_id=any
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