And the Glorious Conclusion!
The Needs ID pile has shrunk by 34,766 observations in just 48 hours! (48 hours of hard, dedicated work, I might add.)
As best as I can estimate, 1,118 new plant observations were added on Saturday and Sunday, as well (I can't figure out how to get the Friday evening new observations.) That means we (and the rest of the iNat identifiers) cleared at least 35,844 (34,766 plus 1,118) observations. That really is just amazing!
And I hope you had as much fun as I did. There were so many notifications coming and going all weekend and I really enjoyed that.
One last surprise: @arboretum_amy was kind enough to give me the form of an API query to determine how many IDs each of you made in the past 48 hours. Here are the results, in alphabetical order, for everyone who contributed:
@apgarm - 718
@babs22 – 45
@brothernorbert – 1,515
@bryanconnolly - 365
@carex - 64
@cbuelow45 - 37
@ceaustin - 52
@cgbb2004 – 1,695
@chr3951 - 75
@cobrien207 – 5,483
@conboy - 14
@connormac – 15
@cs16-levi - 128
@curiousbynature - 288
@ddubois2 - 558
@donlubin - 530
@edfuchs – 3
@er1kksen - 835
@gak0 - 130
@hcoste – 4,276
@jackcadwell – 1,442
@jackieschnurr - 23
@jsolfrian - 227
@karro_frost - 734
@kdodgeart - 34
@kellyfuerstenberg - 3
@kennamae – 12
@klodonnell – 53
@lmtaylor - 746
@lynnharper – 2,629
@margaretcurtin - 68
@maryah – 5,227
@mjpapay - 128
@mohale - 25
@mollyopsis - 1
@natemarchessault – 1,435
@no6km - 25
@nsharp - 69
@nycnatureobserver - 176
@patswain - 347
@peakaytea – 6,090
@quietlymagical - 366
@rinaturalist – 2,106
@robbieedun - 2
@russ_cohen - 37
@slamonde - 165
@stephanieradner - 118
@tarpinian - 73
@trscavo - 467
@tsn – 773
@turtless - 225
@vicki_l - 20
@vickidoo - 16
@xris - 1
@zihaowang - 1
Finally, please let me know, either in a comment or a private message, what you liked or didn't like about this event and how we could improve it going forward. Thank you all so much! You did incredible work, seriously, and I'm going to go boast about it on the forum.
Comments
That's a fantastic number! I've never done anything like this before, and had a lot of fun with it, especially the more coordinated efforts parts and getting a chance to interact more with some of you all!
Thanks Lynn! :-)
Hey Lynn, Thanks for setting this all up, it's a wonderful community to participate in.
Thanks for making this event, it's great to see the progress we made!
Congrats everyone! I should note that number of IDs doesn't necessarily sum up how many observations people cleared away because it doesn't include marking things as Cultivated or As Good As It Can Be.
Thank you, Lynn, for setting this up! It's most certainly a good cause! Plus it was educational. Other IDers offered some excellent tips. Thank you, all!
@lmtaylor, you are absolutely right. I know I marked observations as Cultivated or As Good As Can Be, but I have no idea how to count those.
If I made Excel behave correctly, I think we collectively made 40,690 identifications. That means we were very efficient about making IDs that moved observations out of Needs ID.
It was a lot of fun! Everyone worked so hard to make this amazing number of observations happen. Now for a much needed rest.
We all really need a rest!
A rest is needed, but I am going to finish up the task I was in the middle of at 7:00 -- another 100 or so burdock leaves to mark AGAICB. I know others will feel the same way, so maybe you should count again tomorrow.
Congrats everyone! 40k—that’s crazy! Great job to everyone and congrats @peakaytea for more than 6k IDs!
Thank you, but I made them on the backs of other people. Since we were focused on reducing the numbers, I worked a lot on those needing one more species ID to get to RG. So all of the broad IDs, advancing IDs, etc that came before went into that number.
Or, in other words, I cherry picked the easiest stuff so we could reduce the number of Needs ID.
I also spaced on inviting New Yorkers to the party So I hope that made up for it
@peakaytea I'd say between us (anyone else from NY?) we did pretty good ;)
Wow! Great work
I cherry-picked, too, with the same goal as @peakaytea mentioned above. I chose a few favorite species needing ID and worked through them. As plowed through the original 47 pages of Sambucus canadensis, I noticed that @lynnharper had already done a huge amount of work in the genus about three and a half weeks earlier, so getting lots of research-grade IDs was easy. Thank you, again, Lynn, for that added contribution!
That said, I forgot to play Wordle yesterday, so my streak is broken, and I have to start over. However, participating in this ID-a-thon project was absolutely worth it!
Thanks so much, Lynn, for all your work on this! What an amazing effort (by everyone!)! I just wish that I had more time this weekend to devote to it. Next time!
Great fun, I've been slacking on my IDs lately so it was good to have a good reason to jump back into it. I was not hyper efficient in my methods but still glad to be back IDing. I also started noticing some easy to get out of the ID pile categories if there was another push to clear out the backlog. I'd love to see the number continue to fall this year.
@peakaytea, I spaced out asking the New York Floral Association to help out, but I know we had lots of participation from New York. Maybe next year I'll remember.
@cgbb2004, sorry about your Wordle streak! I did try to push lots of observations (like Sambucus) from genus to species ahead of the marathon, so I'm glad you were able to capitalize on that.
And cherry-picking is absolutely the way to go for an event like this!
@ddubois2, I'm glad this helped you get back in the identifying habit (well, at least until spring really gets here). I'd love to see the Needs ID pile continue to shrink, but frankly, I doubt that it will. I don't have past years' data for New York, but I can say that in New England, the number of plant Needs ID observations already at species level at this time of year almost doubled from two years ago. That's a very worrying trend, frankly, at least from the identifiers' point of view. It's fantastic that so many new observers are starting to use iNat and thus learning about the natural world around them, but even though there are certainly new identifiers coming along, too, we're just not keeping up. If anyone has ideas about how to change that, I'd love to hear them. I started this ID-a-thon as one way to help, but I think we're going to need a lot more.
I had never done identifications on iNaturalist before and this project got me to figure out how to do it.
Hooray! That's great, @vicki_l! Please feel free to ask questions anytime.
@lynnharper It'd be nice if there were new identifier training classes that would cover things like using keys, how to interpret CV suggestions (with appropriate caution), the principles of agreeing or disagreeing on iNat, and so on, and with a focus on helping each person find their competence comfort level so they wouldn't be overconfident. To be most effective, though, it'd have to be a real class with a teacher (preferably live online), and who's going to do that? Pipe dreams....
@vicki_l Glad to hear that!
I will try to finish off some categories in New York and New England. Specifically: the Bellflowers - Campanula; Enchanter’s Nightshades - Circaea; and Bittercresses and Toothworts - Cardamine. I think if we all chip away at things we know best we can accomplish something, maybe not enough but something.
@lmtaylor, that is a great idea and I'm sure you're just the person to do it - I'm kidding, I'm kidding! More seriously, I have thought about an iNat project for new observers, but the way I envision it, it would take more time and energy than I devote to it right now (and I'm retired). But we all should think about a project for new identifiers: how do we recruit people? Can it be a mix of journal posts with Zoom meetings? And so on. Plus, I think one of the big gaps - I'm speaking of myself here - is the lack of knowledge at higher levels. I'm an active identifier, but I am very much NOT a good botanist. I can ID the easy stuff, but I can't find the time to take it to the next level. For example, I just started trying to learn mosses in a serious way last year. I look at all the Sphagnum observations and think to myself, those need microscopic photos to ID to the species level, but really, I'm not even sure of that yet (give me another couple years, maybe). But I think your idea is a good one; now how do we make it happen?
@maryah, may I just say I appreciate your efforts? I think you're right that if we chip away at what we know best, we'll get somewhere. I just had a nice message from someone who observed an elderberry in 2022. @cggb204 and I identified it this weekend and he was writing to say thank you. It's wonderful he was grateful, but I feel badly he had to wait so long for an ID on a perfectly identifiable photo. I suppose we just have to keep trying.
The pile is actually bigger than it seems. There's a great project called Pollinator Interactions on Plants (PIP) of the NE US, involving some of the same people who created NWF's native plant finder for gardeners, and they need people to identify the flowers that insects are on in insect observations. I've been letting plant observations go in favor of doing that for the past few weeks.
@lmtaylor, world-wide on iNat, there are 63.5 million observations needing IDs. Not just plants - all organisms. Even if 10% of those are actually not wild or multi-species or something that is Casual but haven't been labeled Casual yet, it's a daunting task. You are smart to target your IDs on a useful project. Which reminds me: a day or two before the weekend, I had a message from an iNat user (not a project member) wondering about the overall usefulness of ID marathons, when maybe it would be more helpful to concentrate on important taxa or projects or places. They have a good point! I suppose I think of this event of having two useful outcomes: it might entice iNat users into becoming identifiers themselves and it might help observers learn more because they're getting feedback on their observations, even if those observations are of common plants. Plus, it's hard to decide what's useful: identifying invasives because resource managers want to know where to target removal efforts? identifying state or federal or globally rare species because that information helps in land protection or management work? identifying only observations from new observers so they learn more about biodiversity? identifying obscure taxa (ground beetles, algae, etc.) because no one knows enough about them? identifying in the most biodiverse parts of the world? identifying just your friends' observations? I certainly can't decree what's "important" for everyone to work on, but I do think that everyone should select what is important to them to work on.
The problem of unidentified photos isn't quite as dire as it seems, since there are computer tools that can search through them and pull up candidates that might be what the human searcher is looking for. The Unidentifed projects are rather like that. Identifying as much as possible, as we did this weekend, is at least good for training the computer.
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