Ready, Set, Identify!
Here we go! A little before 7 PM on Friday, February 25, there are 271,844 observations of plants in New England that are currently at the species level and still need confirmation by an identifier. Overall, there are 589,935 New England plant observations that need IDs.
Here’s the link to the group of plant observations we’re focusing on this weekend, the ones already at species level: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&iconic_taxa=Plantae&lrank=species&place_id=52339&quality_grade=needs_id
A couple of reminders: Take a break now and then. Only add observations to this project if they are beautiful photos or if you want help IDing them. Remember to mark cultivated plants as not wild. Feel free to comment on this post or any others I make in the next 48 hours if you have questions. Remember you don’t have to ID every observation you glance at; if it’s not easy for you to ID, skip it and move on to another observation.
How to begin: If everyone just starts at the beginning of the link above, we’ll be tripping over each other digitally, so to speak, all IDing the same observations. So you might want to filter for a particular place, a particular time (May, anyone? I could use May right now), or a particular species. I find filtering for a particular species very efficient for making IDs quickly. If you want to “claim” a species to work on, at least to begin with, make a comment below to that effect. And if someone knows Northern Red Oak really well, that's the species with the most observations that need confirmation - 3,165, yikes!
Have fun!
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And I'm going to start with Silene latifolia, White Campion. Somebody has to do it!
One fun way to approach this is to choose "Random" under the "Sort by" filter. Then the observations come up out of sequence. You never know what might come next!
Hoping I can find enough things to id, to make up for all the "Golden Alexanders" I just had to bump to family level ;-).
I just heard that the New England Botanical Society sent out a notice about this to all its members today - welcome to everyone who joined because of that notice and thank you to @wernerehl to asking NEBS to do it!
And I've done what I can with White Campion and Japanese Barberry, although neither is completely done. I'm going to move on to Winged Euonymus, because apparently I am hooked on exotics for this project.
Nuttallanthus canadensis is pretty well cleaned up now ;)
@taluswalker, I noticed that in my notifications - thank you! I went through Japanese Barberry last night and now I'm working on Decodon verticillatus.
While I'm here, let me give a shout-out to @patswain, @peakaytea, and @tsn - soooo many of the observations I worked on last night had first been IDed to species by you three. Good work!
The project is about identifications, but the project statistics shown seem to be only about new observations.
@donlubin, are you talking about the statistics that iNat calculates for each project? If so, you're right - those calculations only measure how many observations are added to a project, not how many identifications are made. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any easy way set up in iNat to track the number of IDs made by project members, short of each member tracking their own IDs at the start and end of the ID-a-thon (and that works only if the members stick to IDing only the target observations for the project). So, for example, I can say I've made just over 500 IDs for this project since last night and all of those were of New England plant observations that were stuck at the species level, but as for overall numbers, I can say the number of species-level observations is down by at least 880 overnight, and the total number of New England plant observations in the Needs ID pile has shrunk by at least 1,761, as well.
So, technically observations that were at species level that I re-identify at the genus or family level will "count" towards the total you're monitoring, right Lynn?
@taluswalker, they definitely count, but I have no good way to measure them, alas. As far as I can tell, what's available for ordinary users of iNat doesn't include a good tool for tracking exactly what happens to every observation. Now if I had told you all to write down how many IDs you've made prior to this marathon (the number is on your profile page) and then to check again at the end (and assuming you didn't sneak off to ID a squirrel or some cool plant in the Mojave Desert, heaven forbid!) - well, then we could just total up everyone's numbers. But I didn't think to ask you all to do that and I didn't do it myself. Maybe next time?
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