Watching the iNaturalist ambassador webinar on identifying today prompted me to release several tools that I have been using to run ID-A-Thons for our Flora of Oregon: Vascular Plants project. All of the tools below are available at https://mickley.github.io/iNat-Tools/ along with their code. I hope that they are helpful to all of you interested in running ID-A-Thons and other identification-related projects!
Progress Bar
The ID progress bar widget lets you set up a progress bar to track the number of identifications made over a given time period. It’s flexible and can be filtered to show identifications for observations in a place, taxon, taxonomic rank, by a group of users, etc. You can optionally add a second comparison bar for a different time period. This can be embedded as an iframe widget into a journal post.
The ID leaderboard widget shows a leaderboard of the number of identifications by user for a given time period. Like the progress bar above, it can be filtered by place, taxon, taxonomic, rank, group of users, etc, and can be embedded as an iframe widget in a journal post.
This tool is designed to show a list of species for a given filter along with the number of observations for each species. It’s similar to what you would find if you clicked the species tab on iNaturalist in the Explore view or on a project. However, those views only show the top 200 species. This tool can show an unlimited number, and by default it will show species with the fewest observations first. For example, this link shows all of the species in the Flora of Oregon: Vascular Plants project that have only been observed once. Clicking on a photo will open up that taxon in the Identify tool on inaturalist. Clicking on the species name takes you to that taxon page. You can also click the Identify All Taxa button to load all the displayed taxa in the Identify tool.
Finding species with few observations for a particular place, project, or taxon is very helpful if you’re looking to identify or curate observations. It lets you easily find observations that might be out of range, incorrectly identified, captive/cultivated (but not marked as such), and rare or otherwise interesting. It can also help an observer find and target species that are in need of more observations to be included in the vision model.
Congratulations to the 10 superidentifiers including @sedgequeen and @oxalismtp on their home patch - and to you for the tools and the journal posts !!
My goal is small. All the biodiversity. Across the continent of Africa. I tackle what I can, to move the IDs … one step … further. Your 2 that I mentioned also help out in Africa. Very curious to see how iNat unfolds the ID-A-Thon.
I run a plant ID-a-thon for New England and New York every February; the 2026 marathon will be our fifth. Your tools are great, thank you! One of the things that has helped us enormously is that the New England Botanical Society invited its members to help out, via their regular email announcements. Maybe your local botanical group could help out, too?
(Our fifth annual ID-a-thon!! We better think up some fun ways to celebrate, come February.)
most general users aren’t going to know what the API supports, only what you tell them your thing supports. since you’re actively promoting your stuff, it seems like it’s your responsibility to clarify what the API is actually capable of and modify your claims as needed before other folks spend a lot of time trying to use your thing in ways that it can’t actually handle.
Sometime in early January I’ll set up the project. We’re not supposed to advertise projects on the forum (I already feel guilty for talking about it so much!), so probably the best thing you can do is follow me and see what projects I’m administering? Or put a note in your calendar to message me in early 2026 - that would work.
