A few tricks of mine:
On the website you can middle-click the “Compare” button, which will lead you to something called the Identotron:
Basically like a larger “Compare” interface. Occasionally what I’ll do when I get bamboozled is predict the family of said bamboozling plant and then look through the species. Basically an automatic, personified field guide. I will say that distributions on iNat aren’t always accurate, so I prefer to cross-reference them with BONAP and the USDA Plants database maps.
An easy way to figure out when you are most likely to see a plant: pull up the seasonality tab on the species profile!
And you can also check when it might be in flower or in fruit, by switching to Plant Phenology. Go to the gear icon and click “Hide No Annotation” to get a neat graph:
Good for hunting down plant locations i.e. plant geocaching - more on that here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/creative-ways-to-use-inaturalist/37428/3
And if there isn’t enough annotations for a good graph, what you can do is fill them out yourself in the Identify modal! Keyboard shortcuts make this process much faster than it sounds. Plus, you’re also adding to the value of the data here. That’s a win for me.
And another way to find useful comments:
See that number? That’s a link. If you click it, it will take you to an observation page will contain all observations that have conflicting IDs of the two taxa. Another way you can find useful iNat conversations, and help some observations out as well…
Yes, this is all plant-related (I am a plant iNatter) but some of it may apply to other kingdoms too.