Exact. That’s for me very important too.
I was so thrilled to see this article and this follow-up poll! In April 2022 a group of us from Native Plant Society of Oregon (NPSO) presented a zoom workshop entitled Becoming an iNaturalist IDENTIFIER ~ NO experience needed. Why identifies are important. We knew from our experiences with BioBlitz’s and other projects that identification was the bottleneck, as explained in the article. If any one is interested in viewing this workshop please contact me (@ribes2018) through iNat and I will provide the link
My reason for initially posting on iNat was about biodiversity knowledge (the choice I chose in the poll) and phenological recording (I use the annotation for plant phenology when I post and when I identify). Over my 5 years of iNat activity I have been equally experiencing ALL the other choices, some I didn’t anticipate but have become very important to me. Especially engaging with a broader audience and the global connection. Being able to see postings from regions all over the world helps to explore the world through flora patterns and diversity at each new location giving a sense of some familiar and new plant combinations, community structure and changes across landscapes.
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Honestly I love being a pedantic little know-it-all and iNat is probably the healthiest and most constructive avenue to exercise this desire… in other words, just for enjoyment!
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Originally to learn …but now… probably more as a form of meditation(?) or, “stimming” perhaps ( I identify a lot with notions on the neurodiversity thread ). Not sure that concept is mentioned on poll - I don’t think that feeling is the same as “you can enjoy yourself”. As it’s not about enjoyment for me as much as it is about a positive repetitive task which brings me distraction and peace of sorts. I do enjoy going down a rabbit hole digging into some IDs though… but that is a different sort of state of mind.
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Yeah, it is very much ‘stimmy’ for me, i enjoyed doing it a lot, i have done a lot less lately after things happened which i mentioned in that other thread… i think keeping a non-toxic and fair environment is essential if we want to keep people involved, but i know that’s hard to do.
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It can be a fun way to kill some time, and I get to help others while doing it. Win-win.
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Definitely because it’s personally rewarding. I identify plants from the two areas I’m familiar with: Denmark and Louisiana, and it gives me an opportunity to follow the flora throughout the seasons in the two areas.
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Some truth to that :-)
I started identifying because i wanted to know what exactly people have been finding out there- at some point i wondered how many of these “book species” actually have been sighted but not identified, so i set out to find out and that became sort of an obsession of mine.
I started off identifying on Flickr first, where it was extremely difficult to come up with search terms that could yield potentially “useful” results (i often had to translate my search terms into the local/vernacular names for the taxon, which sometimes yielded many important sightings)
So when i found out about iNaturalist, it was a dream come true, because no other site catalogues biodiversity like this and makes it easily navigable and i have been identifying on this platform ever since
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To be honest, I identify to give back when I can. I know more knowledgeable people spend hours on this site identifying observations for all of us, and I have benefited a lot from it. There are simply some great identifiers who tirelessly provide IDs and sometimes provide explanations as well. I really appreciate that, so when I have a few minutes and I can help someone else with a simple ID or place an “unknown” at a very basic level, I enjoy doing it. Plus, I get to test out what I have learned. I wish I had more time.
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I like to identify plants that are spreading invasively but which are not widely recognized as doing so. (Escapes from botanical gardens and the like.) iNaturalist is incredible for tracking the spread of novel species.
I also love finding a species which has a lot of observations but very few in research grade. Then all you have to do is learn how to identify it and spend an hour or two going through them all. The added bonus is that you become the top identifier!
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It beats working.
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Monday morning blues?
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I identify with this one strongly.
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It is constructive procrastination :)
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The results are really interesting, they surprised me! I identify to help other people learn about nature because nature makes me happy.
Also what @lisa_bennett just said, I get tired and bored sometimes :)
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For me it’s definitely become a constructive outlet for my OCD symptoms - sitting down and sorting things is somewhat of a compulsion, and in real life it causes me a lot of anxiety because there are never neat categories to put things in (should that book on mycorrhizal interactions go in the fungi section or the plants section? Or maybe I should alphabetize everything by author’s last name instead? Wait, now I have to rearrange the shelves, that book is too big to fit. Now it looks weird because every other book in that category is tiny and there’s just the one huge one, maybe I should sort them by size instead…?)
I know it sounds ridiculous, but it saps a lot of mental energy. So now I can just go and sort everything into tidy little taxonomic categories, which is much better.
The downside is that I can sometimes get really stressed when I see a lot of persistent misidentifications. The worst is when I’m fairly sure something is not correct, but it’s a subject I don’t know enough about to start trying to fix.
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I picked increase knowledge of biodiversity because that is the best category for what is in my mind when I do it. The approach to learning about biodiversity that was current in my formative years – using a field guide – doesn’t seem to be the norm anymore; as more aspects of life have gone online, finding information online has largely taken the place of finding it in print media. So, I see my identifying as basically being part of people’s online “field guide,” since that is easier than trying to persuade them to go back to print media.
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I had an urge to id things long before iNat, even had some online fights over bird ids, heh. I’m not sure how much it’s a result of psychology and how much it’s just fun. I like doing that and it helps others, but also probably helps me, the less needs id there are, bigger chances your observations will be ided. Of course it’s an opportunity to learn, and I now know much more about insects even though I had a serious entomology course before. Sometimes it’s just what I need to do, now I’m not in a hyperfocus state and it’s fine, can live and not feel awful for not iding thousands a day.
I can’t really agree with biodiversity learning part, for that you have no need to id, browsing through observations and taxa, using filters on maps and just looking at said maps will help more with that honestly.
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Everything