When I ID (unknown) plants and friends, I filter to include down to Family. All those broad IDs. But if observers can ‘plant’ surely they can ‘flower’ ? We each have good reasons for how we choose to ID, whether it is location for me, or taxon for a specialist, or someone on a taxon with location sweep. Together we improve IDs across iNat.
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I was just reminded of one even worse I’ve come across: someone with thousands of observations who will upload obvious plants as ‘Life’! I feel like shouting, ‘if you’re going to put an ID, why not put a vaguely useful ID?!?’ Somehow it actually feels even more annoying than the people with thousands of IDs who still upload unknowns (and leave them that way).
I do occasionally upload things as Life, but only if I’m honestly completely uncertain as to the appropriate kingdom. I don’t believe I’ve ever uploaded anything as unknown except perhaps in my first batch when I didn’t understand how the system worked at all.
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Here’s a perfect example of the differing mindsets and approaches of two highly accomplished identifiers:
I myself am of two minds.
I usually ID within the Great Pile of Plants, in my region, and then I am grateful that someone has already put them there for me.
But I do wish that the observations that have no hope of being IDed further (like a single torn leaf, a tangle of plants from far away, or a blur of trees across a skyline) would remain in the Great Pile of Unkowns. Because once they are in Plants, everyone who looks at plants will see them, whereas if they remain in Unkown, only the intrepid souls who venture into that realm will encounter them.
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i dont get how they dont know how to suggest an ID? since when you upload an observation it has a very obvious place to suggest an ID
also they are on the site/app where the whole point of it is to ID the things…
this is such a weird conclusion for someone to get to, at least if they read the part where it says what it is lol
oh i found a bird? the picture that says birds doesnt have this specific bird ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
something like this could help, at least for the people willing to actually put in an ID instead of just a photo
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I think ‘Birds’ at least is a category people are familiar with, whereas probably a large chunk of the population doesn’t know what the word ‘Dicots’ means. I mean, I still don’t understand the conclusion either, but I’m not sure birds is quite the same case.
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I wish people would be brave enough to tick ‘as good as it can be’ more often, to get rid of such observations altogether. After all, both realms are visited, and the only way to get them out of the way is to tick that box.
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I freely admit to being cowardly, in that regard!
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According to me, Unknown IDs exist mainly in 3 forms-
- Newbie form- A new user has not yet learned how to suggest IDs. Simple fix. Happy to help.
- “I have no idea” form- A picture of a leaf mine, for example.
- “I uploaded too many observations” form- bit rarer, but usually seen in some select users, usually with a lot of observations
I will admit, that the only reason I came onto this platform was because I wanted to find out what type of lizard I had just found. Thankfully I realized that I could also find which bird or butterfly I could find in my home or wherever I went and decided to keep using it.
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I like this idea, I don’t have too much time to ID, so I try stick with unknows of the central provinces and I also do the plants of the the highveld provinces, I’m up-to-date so far so tomorrow I’ll start with whatever is observed tomorrow… I take my hat off to you guys that get through the whole continents stuff
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“Life” is not the same as “unknown” (=no ID entered), even if default search options treat them as the same thing.
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question re: Unknowns and helping to ID
Do some observers upload large batches of observations and select unknown to have the obs “camp out” for a while? And then they get back to them later? I want to help ID - but the protocol to jump in and help catalyze the ID when it appears some observers are ‘veteran’ iNaturalists … Do I move on to the next Unknown or push the ID from Unknown? your thoughts (to anyone here).
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As I have said before, in most cases they are not “honest unknowns”, which would imply that the observer has no idea what they saw. The observer is generally aware that they saw a plant. Some observers do honestly upload plants as “Plantae” because they don’t know enough about taxonomy to suggest anything finer. As someone with some general expertise in plants (even though I spend most of my time on insects), I would much prefer to look at Plantae than Unknown if I am in the mood to ID plants, because in unknown I would have to pick through all the fungi and audio files and sea creatures that I have no idea how to identify.
I seems to me that the repeated claim “plant people don’t look at Plantae because there are too many observations” is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – of course if nobody looks at these observations, Plantae will become a “trash bin” that nobody wants to look at. But what if people weren’t being constantly criticized for innocently IDing plants as plants? What if moving plants to Plantae were framed as a useful activity where the next set of IDers could pick it up and move them to class or family or even genus? But of course if we are told from the outset that it is not worthwhile looking at Plantae, why would anyone do so?
It is also misleading to look at the absolute number of plant observations that have been ID’d at kingdom or class. Plants make up a large percentage of the total observations on iNat; the absolute numbers tell you nothing about whether plants are more likely to never be looked at again if they are assigned a broad ID compared to other taxa. There is a continuously growing backlog of unidentified and unidentifiable observations in every taxon on iNat; this number will never become zero and it will tend to increase over time. This is no different for plants than for anything else, except that it involves more observations and therefore more plant people are needed than for other kingdoms.
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Just to clarify, “Unknown” isn’t manually selected by anyone, it’s just a blank field. There are many reasons people might choose not to type something in the field before pressing upload. Check out https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/why-do-some-serious-power-users-add-so-many-unknown-observations/282
Personally yes I’d recommend starting with identifying older observations to avoid those situations where folks plan to add the IDs shortly after uploading.
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Dear IDs, I see there are several ways of doing but the consensus (with the very few replies only) seems to be towards better to have at least the kingdom than the unknowns.
Should we help by allocating plants and fungi to the kingdom or rather leave it alone and focus on those we can classify to class or order at least.
So what would be the favourite way to proceed:
- Leave to unknown, unless specify to Order or better.
- Leave to unknown, unless specify to Family or better.
- Anything is better than unknown. Including kingdom.
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voters
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Going through this I learned a something:
The difference between unknown and life. Makes sense I just hadn’t ever thought about it.
Back to referencing, I thinking ID’ing anything out of “life” or “unknown can help. There have been a few “lost obs” that were years old that once I moved out of the unknown to “gastropodia” it then decently quickly fell all the way down to research grade, or I pushed it into “fungi” that eventually ended up ID’d. My general thought, and I think inat agrees, every filter I can put it through to a finer level helps.
I’m garbage at IDing out anything from poales except I can typically tell a grass vs a cattail. So I ID to the lowest level of taxonomis confidence. Then Tag if I can.
On the OP you mention how unknowns end up, and I would say, two reasons (for me personally) the first is I forget to put it in “life” the second is it was a batch upload and I missed it.
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I wonder if that is an unwanted? artefact of iNat’s recent change to ‘insist’ on an ID, any ID, when we upload. It would be better to talk newbies thru adding a reasonably useful ID … wishful thinking?
there I would like a new DQA for Landscape / Scenery which pushed the obs to Casual, and out of Needs ID.
That one is easy. ID as Life to use the new Leafmine annotation. Those who can leaf mine will find it.
You can keep your hat on ;~) I only try … there are gazillions queued up waiting
there I agree with you.
TLDR I ID Plantae in Africa every day. All done. 560 Reviewed - it feels like more!
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FWIW, it’s not easy to post an observation without an ID in the new app, although to be honest more people do it than I was expecting.
There are currently about 18k “unknown” observations from iNat Next added since May 1st.
And about 307k “unknown” observations from Android and iNat Classic added since May 1st.
(I’ve excluded bacteria and viruses from the search results)
Obviously this is not an apples-to-apples comparison as the userbases are quite different, but it’s still a significat difference in numbers, IMO. Also, spot-checking, quite a few seem to be from experienced users who probably like to add IDs later.
Personally I don’t see too big of a problem with “unknown” observations. They can easily be helped along by the community, and they’re better than a) a wrong ID and b) someone not uploading at all because they don’t know what it is. Better to have the observation than not.
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After reading about it, I’ve recently tried to ID unknown observations. Mostly to a broad level (plant, tree, insect, etc.). Lots at a school for a bioblitz, all new accounts. A few random photos (humans, graphic of animal mascot), but overall it seemed like they made a good effort for totally new participants. Enough unknown IDs that they didn’t know how to add a basic ID, or it’s how students do it on other platforms, starting with “What is this?” Agree that some might think, “Bird” is too basic, they know it’s a bird, and that’s not the question they were asking.
I try to add a welcome to iNaturalist if it’s a new account, and a sentence about adding a broad classification to make it easier for others to find and ID, and a sentence about feel free to add their own broad category to future observations.
Not from the school, photos of lettuce on a plate, squash in a bin at a store, and a potted plant with an ID tag on it already were interesting. No pet photos yet.
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This actually shows more understanding of taxonomy than many people have who never noticed nature before. For some people, “Don’t know what species” = “No idea what it is.” That “plant” or “fungus” is an actual taxon may not have occurred to them.
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The person I’m thinking of is not a newbie - they’ve been around for years and have observations in the six figures. I’ve also seen the behaviour happening as long as I’ve been identifying, so I don’t think it’s due to any recent change. However, since we’re not mean to call out particular people, I should probably stop there and merely bemoan the frustration in private! :-)
Definitely agree. Possibly also one for ‘photo quality hopeless’, for when the ID could be correct but there’s absolutely no way of confirming anything past about Plants. Maybe Vascular plants. I don’t really like disagreeing with people when I can’t produce evidence, so I tend to just leave them - which isn’t great for future identifiers.
I really wish there were an easier way to exclude things with valid IDs from Unknowns/Life. They really don’t belong there…
I have to admit that the possibility of such an attitude has never actually occurred to me.
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