I've Been Thinking
And those of you who know me in real life know that I'm good at getting myself in trouble once I start thinking - for some definitions of trouble.
So, I just participated in an ID blitz: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/id-blitz-december-2021, which concentrated on Unknowns and Kingdom-level observations. It was loads of fun! I worked solely on Unknowns and made more than a thousand IDs over the course of the 48 hours. In total, 54 people made almost 31,000 identifications for the blitz.
But it got me thinking: what if we concentrated on making identifications that moved observations to Research Grade, and thus out of the Needs ID pile? The enormous Needs ID pile, to be exact.
I'm thinking of organizing a two-day ID-a-thon focusing on moving observations to Research Grade in New England, probably sometime in February. Anybody up for helping out? We could concentrate on plants, if that's what people prefer, or keep it wide open (anybody out there know your bacteria to the species level?). Right now, there are just over 560,000 species-level observations in New England that need IDs, 296,000 of which are Plants. (Assuming I've filtered properly; feel free to correct me!). By "species-level," I mean that someone, usually the observer, has narrowed the ID down to a particular species; these observations aren't stuck at Kingdom or Genus or anywhere in between. One more ID could bump these to Research Grade.
I'm happy to set up the project, write journal posts to keep up the enthusiasm, provide some help with how to make IDs if you've not done it before, and try my best to figure out how many IDs we all make, etc., etc.
Any questions? I'm happy to answer any question as best as I can, or find out the answer elsewhere, if there is an answer.
Comments
Good idea, Lynn. I work on the New England Needs ID backlog almost every day, but there is only so much that each person can do. If you have energy to organize a group, to broaden the effort, that would help everybody!
Thanks, Tom
If I may throw in a word of caution. When you say:
By "species-level," I mean that someone, usually the observer, has narrowed the ID down to a particular species; these observations aren't stuck at Kingdom or Genus or anywhere in between. One more ID could bump these to Research Grade.
This scares me a little bit. I spend quite a bit of time running through Bombus (Bumble Bees) and there are a lot of mis-ID'd observations on here, many are Research Grade. What often happens, is someone put a wrong ID and someone else agreed with them, I've run into some where 2, 3, or 4 people agreed on a wrong ID. When this happens, it's difficult to get it corrected, especially if the identifiers are inactive.
I don't have a problem with an ID event but please only place (or agree) ID's that you can personally defend if someone asks. Many of the initial ID's that were placed were guesses and therefore unfounded, so shouldn't be supported.
@tsn, you do extraordinary numbers of identifications! I can't imagine you have time to do more than you already do!
@neylon, you are absolutely correct. I certainly don't want to encourage anyone to agree with every single species-level observation out there, just for the sake of shrinking the Needs ID pile. If this ID-a-thon really happens, I would plan to write a journal post for the project that says essentially exactly what you've said here. Plus, there are many ways an observation can leave the Needs ID pile without becoming Research Grade: it could be planted or in captivity, so it should be marked as Not Wild and thus end up as Casual. The genus ID might be correct, but the photos might not be enough to decide on a species. The observer's species-level ID could be wrong. And, of course, the identifier may truly not know how to ID the species (which certainly happens to me!). Thanks for pointing this out!
That's a great idea. Unless the weather is gorgeous, or the snow is good :) I'd be in for maybe 4 hours though.
@jeremycoleman, I'll arrange for two days of cold rain. ;-)
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