Where do I start?

People gave some good advice here, so I’ll give my own:

  • Don’t assume everyone here is an expert who knows what they’re doing, has had training in it, etc. A few years ago, I was in the same position as you. In some ways, I still am, but I’m learning more every day about just what’s around me.

  • If you don’t know what something is when you upload a picture of something, you can leave something very, very general, like ‘plantae’ (if you type ‘plant’ the AI should give you ‘plantae’), fungi, animal, insect, etc. This is immensely helpful, because it allows people to identify specific things to see it, and narrow it down, or say ‘oh, this isn’t an insect, this is something else’.

  • Some things take longer than others to identify, either due to lack of knowledge, there being more species to be mindful of, a lot of lookalikes, etc. We have tons of people who know their birds, but not as many for fungi.

  • Upload those fungi, insect, etc pics regardless of how hard it may be to ID them. It may take years, but that just means you’ll see an update on an observation you made two years ago, and you learn something new.

  • You don’t need to be the expert of every plant, animal, insect, mushroom, etc in your country. I know stuff that’s in my area, and that’s it. If I go to North Dakota, I’d likely just shrug and say ‘it’s a plant’. And that’s okay. I can’t tell the difference between warblers, but there are people here who know their warblers and will narrow that stuff down for me. It’s great. If I see a dwarf larkspur in their observations, I’ll be able to help them back.

  • don’t rely on the AI suggestions if you don’t know. The AI is only as good as the amount of observations it has to learn from, and it can’t narrow down between lookalikes. That said, definitely use it to get a general idea of what something is. If it’s giving you all duck species and you know it’s a bird that looks like a duck, you can probably go with ‘duck’. On the other hand, if you have a fungi that the AI is saying is a sea anemone, and you’re not underwater, disregard the AI.

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