It would be good to know what features of an organism should ideally be included in a photo submission to iNaturalist. Don’t know if this could be done, but maybe when someone submits a photo that is identified as ‘Quercus’ a note comes up that suggests photographing acorns, if possible, or bark of the tree, or underside of leaves, etc.
This would be a good thing with Desmia moths where the note could suggest getting a photo of the underside of the moth, not just the top. (D. funeralis or maculalis best id’d by seeing spots on the uderside)
I still consider myself a new IDer and there have been a few things that I found more helpful as I’ve stumbled into this.
The first thing is I picked a few plants I felt fairly confident in IDing to a section or Genus (iris) and then worked on refreshing the other taxonomic information I knew/know. E.G. Is it a grass species or is it just in the Order Poales?
Going along I have had some help @egordon88 has helped by giving me a couple gems of advice that ironically I haven’t used yet. I’ve also been able to watch the IDs in my area progress and I’ve noticed a few places they get stuck. (Vascular plants).
The most recent thing I’ve been doing is annotating and Marking as Captive or not Wild. With the CNC last year I’m still finding “vascular plants” of bradford pears that were clearly planted. or Rain trees that are also clearly planted. I often also put a comment stating that I’m doing it so that 1 other IDers can see that I did it and so that 2 the OP can argue against it (no this was a volunteer) e.g. the catalpas in my area that are establishing outside of managed areas.
So DianaStuder got it right, figuring out where the IDer is interested. For me it is a general enjoyment and a focused attention to plants.
Also something I’ve just stumbled on it looking around your area for projects, then seeing how they select their observations often helps me look at obs differently or want to put in a different annotation.
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Indeed. It’s the old Dunning-Kruger effect- the less knowledge you have about some topic, the less well-equipped you are to evaluate the accuracy of your knowledge on the topic. The most wishy-washy people are often the most knowledgeable, who recognize the complexity of the question; the most certain people are often the most ignorant, unaware of how much they don’t know. For certain difficult taxa, the experts are the ones leaving them at family/genus, and the people with less knowledge are the ones confidently adding unwarranted species-level IDs.
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I’m never quite sure how helpful identifying to order/class is (especially when there’s already one ID at the species level). So far no one’s told me to stop doing it, but I have had to explain that I wasn’t correcting the people who came before me.
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It is more rewarding to move Unknown / Life / Kingdom Disagreements 23.7K (filter to your preferred location) to Order or Class where they have a chance of a better ID.
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One possibility, if the identifier is brave is to find a small identification resource, learn it and apply it for identifying on iNaturalist. By small identification resource, I am referring to primary literature or close to it, typically a scientific article that includes a dichotomous key for less than 20 species with a glossary of various parts of the anatomy. Bugguide.net lists thousands of these. Figuring out these articles are hard, but chances are good for finding species ready to be identified few others have tried.
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I don’t have it anymore, but there is a publication Natural History of the Evergreen State College Campus, which includes a key to the terrestrial gastropods of Thurston County, Washington. As those are a group with a shortage of ID resources, publications of this nature can fill an important gap.
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I would suggest that people learn by looking, reading, and asking questions, rather than by hindering the process of things reaching research grade by throwing out unuseful guesses. People can also learn by posting their own observations and offering a suggested ID that can then be disputed.
As another reply to my comment suggested, guesses on much older observations that still aren’t research grade could be considered more reasonable, as there’s a need to get something done about them, but if anyone is guessing they also need to be keeping a close watch so they can withdraw their incorrect ID ASAP, as otherwise it hinders things reaching research grade with the correct ID.
In your example, the better option is for people to ID to Chironomid level, instead of incorrectly guessing to species level.
I guess the latter is what I mean by “certain”. A true certainty based on knowledge of distinguishing features, rather than a false certainty based on thinking oneself knows better because of Dunning-Kruger.
As above. When I said certainty I meant an educated certainty that can be backed up by reasoning, rather than a Dunning-Kruger certainty.
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That would be a valid point if generating Research Grade data was the only mission of iNat. But your proposed solution takes away from iNat’s other goal of connecting people with nature.
I don’t think it’s super useful to ID to order/class if there’s already accurate, undisputed lower-level ID, as it’s not really adding anything of value to the observation, unless you’re actually correcting people. It’s not actively hindering anything though, so it’s not really a problem.
I’m not sure how making unuseful guesses, that negatively affects other people’s experience on the platform, helps connect people with nature.
When I put up observations, I’m looking for accurate IDs that further mine and others’ knowledge of what species are present in an area. People making clearly wrong guesses affects—particularly when they then don’t withdraw those incorrect guesses—that knowledge by muddying the waters. We end up with situations where a rarer species isn’t recognised in valuable lists that are used to obtain grants to protect species such as that rarer species that isn’t recognised, or where there becomes a mistaken belief that a particular species is present in a certain area when there is not. Other people then have to put in additional work to ensure those mistakes are corrected. This negatively impacts others’ experience with iNaturalist by creating additional work for others.
It’s totally fine for people to not know something is anything other than “plant” or “dicot” or “insect” or “Lepidoptera”. Start by helping out with those, and then following those observations to see where it goes from there. Make observations oneself and learn from where the ID ends up and by asking questions of IDers as to how they arrived at that conclusion.
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IMO part of the learning process is getting things wrong and fixing them, so I really don’t see what’s so wrong with wrong id → withdraw.
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My personal rule is that I’ll always ID to a more narrow group if I can (class to family, for example) but I don’t ID to a wider group (e.g. family to class) except in special cases. I normally don’t agree to any level above the species, either, except in those cases where I think the observation should go to RG at the genus level. However, my rules are not iNaturalist rules. You can make up your own just as I did. What you’re doing certainly isn’t wrong.
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I feel similarly, the one other case where I think it helps to agree at a level above species is if a disagreement is causing the community taxon to be even higher. If an observation of an obvious spider is stuck at arthropods with one insect ID and one spider ID I’ll throw on another spider one to help get it to the spider people, even if my ID has to be at a coarser level than the existing one due to my poor spider understanding…
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I normally don’t ID to a wider group unless:
- it’s been IDed to subspecies, and I know the species, but not the subspecies. E.g. it has one ID as artiodactyl and one as Columbian black-tailed deer, I ID it as mule deer if I can verify that it’s that species.
- there’s a disagreement. E.g. it’s been IDed as Eristalis and Andrena, if I can tell which it is, I’ll ID as Brachycera or Aculeata.
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Ah that makes sense as a good guideline, I’ve definitely been in that situation
In general I don’t add IDs that are broader unless it is an ID I know and there has been disagreement. I’ve seen a lot of pines marked incorrectly by OP then ID’d to a level I cannot ID so I put in the level I’m confident in.
The other time I put in a broad ID is there is something I’m hoping to keep track of, Then I ID to the level I’m confident and leave a comment to tell myself in the future so I can go back and adjust it. Recently I was corrected on an insect ID I did with an online guide that put my ID further than it was appropriate, someone corrected it, then I backed my ID back out.
Phma corrected something I had mislearned about Fungi, and I’m currently attempting to tread water in lichens….. attempting. I think in General IDing is a great way to learn about new things if your willing to be wrong. I’m finding it significantly easier than restarting school as an adult.
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I just found out about this preprint about using the iNat Dead annotation to find wildlife mortality events from one of its coauthors, Rebecca Johnson. She encourages people to annotate things dead things as such and says it’s pretty useful.
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I’ve often found that when people give their reasons, the distinguishing characters they use are not the ones that define the species. For plants, it might be, “The flower colour looks like what I’ve seen” or, “The leaves seem droopy, so I think it’s Drooping Mistletoe.” So, it still takes more than being able to give a reason.
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Tracking the mortality rate of organisms around human infrastructure can be very useful. Tracking species around roadways (especially threatened and endangered) and bird deaths from windows are what first come to mind for me.
Also, some others may be sensitive to gore and giving the option to filter out potentially gory obs, while it may not be “useful”, is at least a considerate feature.
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