That’s actually a really good ID rate.
That process is a good one. Also, look for ones that are at an absurdly high level (eg. ‘life’ or ‘plant’) and knock them down to something that falls into a more narrow category.
If there are any species or parts of the world you’re interested in, then filter by them and look around.
A bit irritating when I battle to ID an Unknown to a broad category. Then the observer comes along and goes straight to species. I could have skipped that one.
We need that draft mode, for observers whose workflow is - hang on - I will get to this - soon!
The journal works well for that.
Hm, just to be sure I look in the right place - where would that placeholder appear? Instead of the “Unknown” title, or above the notes? Or somewhere else on the page?
The placeholder appears up by the name of the organism. Often it says something like UNKNOWN (Placeholder: Foz Squirrel). It’s a name the person typed in, a name that didn’t match anything that iNaturalist has.
Good practice: ALWAYS copy “(Placeholder: Foz Squirrel)” and put it in the notes. That explains to everyone what the first identifier meant.
I often find that the placeholder was a misspelling (e.g. the example, for Fox Squirrel). Sometimes it’s a species that iNaturalist doesn’t know about but I can enter the genus name. Sometimes, I have no clue what the observer meant by the placeholder, so I name the observation at a higher level, e.g. Mammal.
Congratulations and thank you for all your identification efforts thus far! The number of identifications you have contributed in 2 months is amazing, definitely at least in the top 5% of identifiers during a similar time period. I was hoping for 12,000 a year.
One of the things I did when I was first started doing identifications on iNaturalist was a variation on the starting local advice. On the web based version, I search for observations that need ID in my local area, then look at he species list. From there, I could go through each species that I was confident identifying, and confirm those that had clear enough photos of the features I needed to be sure of the ID.
Alternatively, I have picked a species I don’t know as well, that had a lot stacked up in the needs ID pile, and researched that species, checking out closely related species that occur in the area and how to distinguish them. This has helped both with my ID skills, and learning new species for me to observe, learning what to photograph to get the details needed to ID them (especially with plants).
iNat puts Placeholder
top left, prime real estate on an (English left to right) web page!
And then they disappear it. Staff knows it is intended to be temporary, and iNatters will learn the hard way.
I like to take observations with very similar taxa next to each other to play with the CV like taking a picture of a Hickory tree in a pawpaw patch.
^ This. I have a folder on my desktop of ones I know that I can easily tell from other contenders. Even if this narrowed down to because of the area, that’s still stuff I can easily ID. I did have to sadly retire a few links, like Pokeweed, due to an invasive species that is hard to ID from leaves alone, as well as Wild Hydrangea which can be hard to tell from Grey Hydrangea. outside of a few details. However, a Winged Euonymus is gonna still be going strong.
Everyone’s got stuff they’ve have more experience with than others once they’ve gotten more comfortable, but even just going ‘this is a plant’ helps, since sometimes people who upload their backlog aren’t able to snag them all.
Yes! So hard in with low bandwidth – sometimes my observation uploads but my identification doesn’t come with it and can’t check until I’m back in range
If your identification area is active, you may notice a handful of the same identifiers popping up in the area’s observations.
Amongst these regulars, if you see someone who is able to identify some of the tricky taxa, @ them in one of those observations, asking what resource(s) they’d recommend for identifying between that taxa and another, similar one, for example.
Although iNatters don’t generally leave comments on their identifications, most are pretty excited to share their knowledge when asked.
I second this. I’ve been using iNat for a long time but hadn’t done much identification. I’ve been more interested lately and reading the forums. Wanting to help out with iding, I selected my area in Austin (circle selection’s great) and filtered for various easily identifiable butterflies migrating through now then picked species I knew from a glance like queens, Gulf fritillaries, monarchs, etc. and did about a hundred fairly quickly. I am going to try to keep at the approach.
My examples for easily identifiable things was definitely biased and based on what I find easy to identify, but you got the point of what I was trying to articulate! If you know something, start with what you know.
Trying and failing to get thru to an iNatter yesterday. My polite snarl didn’t land in the right place.
They have 19K obs - which means they require about 40K IDs to get them to CID and Research Grade.
They have IDed 2. That is one, two - not even touching their own 19K. Surely after 19 thousand obs you would know what some of them are??
Is there a way to identify without that leading to iNaturalist notifications from that observation showing up on your dashboard? I would identify more often if it didn’t lead to me being notified whenever the id gets refined
After identifying, there’s an option to unfollow ID. Click on the “Follow” button top/right and there’s a link to unfollow.
You can turn off agreeing ids, but you can just ignore notifications.
You can unfollow, but if it turns out that your ID was wrong - you won’t know till you check your mavericks.
I do unfollow once I can see CID is with me. Or when the ID has gone beyond my skill set.
How do you check your mavericks?
To check mavericks: https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?user_id=sedgequeen&category=maverick but replace “sedgequeen” with your user name.