Sometimes, it can feel like a slog doing “unknown” observations, but then there are the times when you see a lonely observation of something nifty make it to RG. Here’s one from a weekend spree I did on “unknown” observations (I don’t focus on a geographic area, I pick them by what I can reasonably narrow them down to) – an orchid that is endemic only to South Africa! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/311913466
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Feel free to share your cool “unknown” upgrades in this thread!
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then you must see them in flower https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/139334590
They were poured out alongside the road after our mountain fire this year.
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beautiful !!
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It’s always fun to find something interesting in the pile of “unknowns”. I find the iNaturalist Metadata Tool extension for Chrome very helpful for sorting unknowns into kingdoms or phyla.
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I absolutely trawl through plants kingdom to order, often, so anyone getting stuff out of unknown into that bucket helps me move them along to genus or species often enough, so thank you for your efforts!
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I often scroll through the unknown section and have found it quite rewarding. Multiple times I’ve been able to find observations of species that had not yet been observed on iNaturalist.
Sometimes you find something really special posted by a new iNaturalist user in the unknown category. That new user may very well had never provided an initial ID so if you weren’t the one to find that observation it had the potential to get buried forever in a forever expanding sea of unknowns.
Helping new users get their observations discovered by taxon experts feels very rewarding when you find out the observation was a first for iNaturalist. It all starts from you just providing an initial ID, even if it’s pretty far back on the taxonomic tree.
Here’s three I helped find:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/249835566
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I do like to go through Unknown observations occasionally, but I wonder if I’m actually doing anything useful - most of the time I can only identify to Plants or Fungi or something like that, which makes me feel like I’m not actually doing anything substantial.
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I like to try but I’m not an expert in anything (yet?) and typically don’t have much in the way of wiggle room for IDing unknowns. I have had a couple that got ID’d down to species. There was this grasshopper that you could only see the underside of the end of the grasshopper and it had landed in “life” because the OP ID’d insect and the first IDer went the “plant” route.
I was able to push it back to insect and less than a week later the “grasshopper butt” was research grade. That was fun.
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I do the same but I think that anything is better than unknown where it never gets seen by anyone. I have had quite a few that ended up with a correct ID in the end so I think that it is worth the effort.
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The best answer is when your notifications roll in.
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its pretty useful a lot of ppl ID plants right after I bump it from unkown to plantae! and many times theyre common household/garden plants and sometimes very cool ones
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Kingdom Disagreement is also a good place to start (can filter to your preferred location - I clear Africa each day)
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I would’ve loved to comment on this thread but I haven’t really saved the good ones I came across, I don’t have much to add but its very rewarding to ID rare lepidopterans and mantodeans(not sure if this is an actual word)
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I do this but in India!! thank you for your work in africa!
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I try to search for unknown observations with photos in Northeast Ohio and surrounding area, but they are usually not-so-good photos of plants and fungi.
Now, searching for unknown audio observations can be definitely something to pursue for me. One of the most frequent things in the unknowns in the U.S. Midwest I find are gray tree frogs. That’s perfectly understandable. That particular frog call can be tricky if you don’t know what their calls sound like. When I find one of those, I also include a link to a webpage of frogs calls.
There are also a number of unknown recordings that turn out to be birds. And, a lot of them (with the help of some processing with Audicity) can be identified. I expand my search range to include a lot of surrounding states and even up into Canada for those.
So, I agree that the unknowns can be difficult. But, there are some gems in there!
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Yeah, I try to do this when I can, I have definitely seen stuff eventually make it to research grade. Feels nice!
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Fungi can be hard, but with plants I think it’s often possible to go a little beyond kingdom. Like if you see flowers it’s almost certainly Angiospermae, or it’s often relatively easy to tell if something is a conifer. I often challenge myself to see if I can go beyond kingdom if I can (but if I can’t I don’t push it). It’s a good learning opportunity.
Even if you don’t do that, when you follow up on peoples finer IDs, try to learn some of these broad differences.
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Hey does anyone have a good form of words to put in the comments when you notice a fairly new user uploading unknowns?
Something along the lines of “Welcome to iNaturalist. Please when uploading ID to the broadest taxa you know….blah blah.” I can never find what feels like the most helpful wording for a new user that gets the point across politely and tells them why it’s a good idea. I’d like to have a blurb in my notes that I can just copy paste.
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There’s a “frequently used responses” page you can use. Frequently Used Responses · iNaturalist Here’s the verbiage from that page - however, I’ve gotten a few negative responses when I use it so I typically don’t say anything.
“Hi, welcome to iNaturalist! Even if you don’t know the exact species of what you have observed, you can search for and select a higher level identification, such as “plants (kingdom Plantae)” or “insects (class Insecta)”. Many people helping identify observations on iNaturalist filter the observations by the group of species they know how to ID (like plants or insects), so observations with a blank ID like this one will be excluded from those filtered searches. Selecting general ID, and adding it under “Suggest an Identification” helps funnel your observation to someone who may know what they’re looking at, and that way it can get identified sooner. Here is a video tutorial for the mobile app: https://vimeo.com/162581545 ”
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