I was looking for a new species to identify and I settled on a familiar tree to me. I began identifying J. virginiana on 28 December 2024. I only identified trees in Northeastern United States and Canada. I checked the Needs ID for the species and found 395 pages. That’s over 12,000 species! I was not even in the top 500 identifiers, so I had identified less than 15 observations of this species. I was perplexed as to why this common species had such a backlog. I dug in. By 31 December I had made 428 IDs. I moved to 23rd on the leader board, and these IDs helped me reach 32, 000 IDs at the end of 2024. I started again on 1 January and continued until I had no more pages to look at on 31 August 2025.
So, what did I learn from 8 months of focus on a single species? First, I learned you need to know how similar species are identified, not just the target species. Almost every day there were non-Juniper species in the pile. I also had to learn about cultivars. Juniper cultivars are common, as are cultivars of other Cupressaceae members. Looking at the planting location on the maps helped in marking many of these observations as cultivated. In addition, I learned about the wide variety of shapes, colors, and habitats the tree occupies in the target region. I also learned how to quickly annotate most of the observation.
I learned a lot about people’s photography practices. I quickly learned when to mark a picture as reviewed and moved on. I learned some observers like to take shots of trees on roadsides. At first these were frustrating, but I found out they had specific reasons for doing this even if the trees were not always identifiable. Lastly, I learned about patience. I often see this in advice to new observers. The oldest observations were from 2018. That’s a lot of patience! This species is very common, and I don’t see why users, especially new users would want to hang around for 7+ years for an identification. Sadly, I found many observations taken by users who are no longer active and made fewer than 100 observations. I wondered if we identified their observations a little quicker if they might have hung around long enough to love iNaturalist.
That’s quite an achievement. I don’t worry about the folks who briefly add observations and then disappear. Maybe they had to do it for a class and weren’t really into it. Others might be and will come back in the future. When I started iNat I added few records and paid little attention to it. It took years before I became more involved. And I learned patience along the way when it comes to IDs.
I’ve been on a Corylus (Hazel) ID kick for a few weeks and have now ID’d several thousand obs and have had some of the same experiences. Common species hanging around for a long time at ‘needs ID’. Yes, some obs are tricky if not impossible to ID to species, but some appear to have just sat there waiting for someone to come along to ID it. Thanks for all your efforts on this juniper species!
I remember getting a handful of IDs from you a couple weeks ago! They were roadside photos from being bored as a passenger on a road trip to Florida 6 years ago, so they must have been near the end of your review. Thanks so much for eventually getting to them, as well as everyone else’s!
As one of those people who likes taking photos from the road, I feel a need to say thanks for your patience with my silliness. At some point, observing J. virginiana became somewhat of a past time during longer road trips with my family both as a way to pass the time and to better map the distribution for modeling efforts. However, I have always mildly worried that I was making a minor mess for others to deal with. I’m glad reading here to see that it’s not as much of a bother as I had worried. Thanks so much for your patience and time IDing both my stuff and that of others.
Interesting. I’ve mostly stopped submitting IDs for J. virginiana for exactly the reason you mentioned in your second paragraph. There are so many other species that look like it, in its variety of shapes and colors, that I gave up trying to learn and distinguish among them all. Congratulations on your hard work.
Shot on the side of the road at 80 mph through dirty tinted glass. At night. // I’m sorry)
As observer I don’t care about id of my observations, especially about RG. Many of them were identified by single expert long time ago and stay as “Needs id“. Of course, there always are observations I desire to be identified, but in such case I always can mention someone and kindly ask.
Yes! I cannot emphasize enough how much the fast identifications matter for a new user. I was lucky enough to have @apgarm helping me ID virtually everything I observed in my first weeks/months of iNat and I have been hooked ever since. Its almost like every new (observer) member needs a (identifier) mentor…
Possibly get a point on their personal coverage map. I did just that on my bike when I did not want to stop, although only a few times. Normally I do stop.
This is one of my favorite things to have happen as an identifier. In fact, when I ID something and then happen to realize that the observer is a newbie, my MO is to try to help with any other observations they may have submitted. I like to add a short comment as well (‘Great shot! Thanks for submitting it!’). :)
i got into a big kick of identifying new world vultures for a while, and i am happy to return to it sometimes when i have the time. in the united states there are only turkey vultures and black vultures, and some condors out west, but there were hundreds of pages of needs id new worlds in the us, and a surprising amount of juvenile cathartes are mis-ided as black vultures to “research grade” because they have dark heads (a satisfying one to fix). my goal in the distant future would be to review every single new world vulture observation to the best of my ability— there are over 300,000 obs, and i’m at about 40,000 ids. i have admittedly not really touched it for a while but that just means there will be more to dig through later! when you id so many obs of one taxon you develop a special fondness for it even if it is very common, and you get good at recognizing it because you’re training your brain on the pattern recognition through tens of thousands of pictures. and i know exactly what you mean about clicking review and moving on sometimes, there’s only so much i can do to identify three black pixels against a blue background lol.
I similarly identified 23k Koelreuteria observations from across the world in about a month and probably spent 200-300 hours doing so, although I haven’t kept track. I can definitely corroborate everything that you’ve learned. The main dilemma I run into regarding identifications is specialization: to increase my identification rate, I must narrow the scope of my identifications to a genus (or subgeneric taxon in the case of large genera), which tends to become repetitive. Instead of identifying thousands of observations of only the 3 species of Koelreuteria for the whole month of August, I could have identified hundreds of observations of many genera to spice it up. Unfortunately, there are so many observations “in need” on iNat that specialization is required to make significant, quantifiable progress. The best way to learn to identify many different organisms for me is actually to make observations, not identifications