Every few months I go back to look at my older observations that need ID. Sometimes I’ve learned enough to ID them. Sometimes the CV has improved enough to ID them.
My earliest ‘needs ID’ observations are generally ones that are difficult to ID (or maybe just short on skilled IDers), and ones where I didn’t get good-quality photos of the right features of the organisms.
Some seem easy to ID and have just been ‘forgotten’, though. Sometimes I’ll try to bump them onto people’s radars by trying to narrow the ID down another notch, like putting one that I left at ‘plants’ to ‘flowering plants’. It occasionally works.
What are your earliest observations that still haven’t reached Research Grade? Do you go back and review them?
EDIT: I’ve revised the wording so it doesn’t look like anyone is asking for people to ID their observations.
I think this is a fine topic to discuss, but just adding a reminder that the forum isn’t a place to ask for IDs on iNat, so please avoid posting links to specific observations for others to ID.
I recently went through my old observations, I ended up removing some that I now realize were hopelessly terribly photographed. Aside from that I have a lot of small insects and lichens that will possibly remain on the “not ID’d yet” catagory.
Also shout out to @egordon88 for slogging through and pushing almost all of my insect and arachnid IDs further. That was immensly helpful and exciting for some of them.
In terms of date uploaded, the earliest were from 2018, the year I joined iNaturalist. They are the plant-like sea animal Sertularia sp. and a morel that came into a garden via wood chips.
In terms of date the photo was taken, my earliest are a sea urchin test from 1971 and a Tall Fescue from 1989. Earlier ones may show up as I get more of my earlier slides scanned to computer files and posted.
About 57% of my observations are unidentified or unconfirmed. There just aren’t many identifiers for my stuff. Even very easy species go unconfirmed. Occasionally, an id does come in - I got one last week (an octopus). And just yesterday, I put a name to a previously unidentified bivalve, but it will be years, maybe decades, before someone else comes along to confirm or contest it.
The one I am most curious about is the tail (?) with brilliant green margins that I photographed while tidepooling in 2022. I probably have several tidepool creatures where the computer vision is not good, so I just had to put my best guess. I don’t really know who to tag about them, as I don’t know what branch of life they fall into.
I have old photos that haven’t reached Research Grade (because I haven’t uploaded them!), but Caroline’s question got me thinking about historical records:
Barbara “wins” for having the oldest observation in this thread (so far) at 55 years. Barbara reminded me of something that Daniel said, that I always find inspiring:
A lot of naturalists have boxes of photographs that go back for decades. We might want to digitize our life’s work before it’s gone forever, but it can also feel overwhelming to even consider such a huge project. Uploading a few records a day could be a nice winter task. You might have the only record of a habitat that has been paved over, or of a species whose range has changed.
That’s the great thing about uploading to iNaturalist: like Daniel said, we never know when one of our old photographs might become scientifically valuable. Perhaps that’s the ultimate legacy that we can leave as nature lovers.
My oldest is Eratigena atrica agg - fair enough, it’s a species complex, with a bad photo. A lot of my 2022 observations still at Needs ID are things like that - lacewings, the most generic looking of generic looking flies, genuses of spider and insect which all look the same like Pardosa or Tipula or Metellina and so on.
But a lot of those 2022 observations I have are of things that are ‘obvious’. Jacobaea vulgaris, even Cynara cardunculus (globe artichoke - what else looks like that in the UK?). Those don’t need master botanists - they’re ‘easy’ for this region. They just got missed when first uploaded, and now they’re years ago, they’re not going to turn up unless you’re looking for them.
Identify lets you sort by ‘Random’. Sometimes when you get an observation that’s years old in there it’s not a great photo or some very cryptic taxa - but a lot of the time, it’s something fairly easy that just got missed by identifiers. Well worth doing from time to time!
Ive only been on Inat for a little over a year, so it hasn’t been that long, but a house gecko from October 2025 in New Orleans! :)
Some of my missed observations clearly got buried, like a Texas Brown Tarantula, and others might not be IDable since I didnt take the right photos or neglected to get a sound recording (A Brittlegill that I only got overhead pictures of, or a blurry blue jay pic that I could hear).
Totally agree! Someone else recommended it in a different thread, so I gave it a try and found that it spit out more interesting observations than trying to work from earliest to latest, especially for taxa with tons of observations.
It also helps solve the issue the OP highlighted, as well as helping to “fix” old misidentifications that reduce CV effectiveness and accuracy.
I’ve actually recently been going through my old needs IDs and tagging the appropriate people to get some help. It’s worked decently well with most people responding in a few days. Currently my oldest is a harvestman that’s stuck at genus. The person I tagged informed me that it can’t get further than genus but since it has no community ID yet, I can’t mark it as good as can be. I recommend marking things good as can be when that’s been determined. I’ve started using it more often and anything family or below gets promoted to research grade. Anything higher than family gets moved to casual.
I still have about 40 observations from 2013 that aren’t Research Grade. Mostly insects and spiders. Some of them probably aren’t possible to ID further, but 8 of them are IDed to species and have just never been confirmed. I’ll check on them again in another 13 years!
In the year 2013 I visited the Dominican Republic an refound Salvia lachnaioclada a Hispaniolan endemic sage, with a single known wild population in the DR. The species had not been documented since the year 2000 when Benjamin Torke pubished his revision of Salvia section Ekmania.
I have been back, counting each and every seedling and adult plant I found at the site in the year 2016,
…this last census of the only known wild population had an effective population size of 7. Means there were just 7 mature / flowering plants.
At 7 plants, this seems to be one of the rarest plants in the Caribbean. - And this is probably also the first time you are hearing about this species. This means: This species doesn’t recieve the media attention it deserves.
Needless to say: Most iNat observations of seedlings and juvenile / non-flowering plants, in the census years 2019 / 2020 aren’t researchgrade until now.
And as I’ve been counting and iNatting all plants, in the only known remaining wild population, for several years - it’s probaby one of very few species, that have several times more iNat observations than living individuals.
Which is weird as I’m sure I was uploading observations before 2014 (I’ve been a user since 2011 or so), but for some reason 2014 is the earliest uploaded by date I’m seeing.
Forgotten? I wouldn’t call it that - about a third of my observations still “Need ID” according to the search - the oldest was observed in 2003, it’s a butterfly, not a great photo (from an old analog SLR with basic 50mm lens) of a difficult genus - then the there is a few in the next years and then it slowly picks up as we got digital cameras and actually started taking pictures of things. There’s a lot of insects where I simply don’t have an idea and just put the “pretty sure” CV taxon, but interestingly also a lot of rather easy birds that just nobody looked at to confirm (but I am pretty sure with them myself, so I don’t really care) - overall it’s over 22 thousand observations, so I don’t really expect them to be cleared up any time soon.
The 3rd observation I ever posted is my oldest Needs ID. A fungus observation submitted in April 2017. I don’t think it can count as “forgotten” though since I got a couple IDs, but they are disagreeing. I don’t know who is right because I didn’t take a photo of the underside. My oldest forgotten observation (no IDs except mine) is from a couple months later. It’s a spider that should be easy to get a second genus level ID for and mark as good as it gets.
Lots of caveats, not my voucher, is a hybrid, etc., but the oldest I have is from an herbarium specimen of an oak from 1951. Being a hybrid and added way after it was collected (and not a live specimen, etc.) probably helps keep it under the radar.
I have a bunch more similar from the herbarium, but it’s not really important they get confirmed, just that they’re recorded properly for future botanists to use if anything happens to the herbarium, and for those that can’t visit or aren’t aware of it.
I liked your post to show support for this statement, because there’s a lot implied in it. Not only the healthy disregard for fetishizing Research Grade on iNaturalist, but also awareness of the fires that sometimes happen in herbaria and natural history museums, which destroy countless valuable records. I’m always relieved to hear about the methodical digitization and/or DNA barcoding of collections, so that as you said, we can support future researchers if the current collection is somehow destroyed.
Why am I stating the obvious for 99% of readers? Because one person reading this might be a young teenager who isn’t aware of this dynamic, and they might be inspired to help digitize collections.
