New England Plants ID-a-thon, Feb. 25-27, 2022

You all did a FANTASTIC job with this marathon! At just past 7 PM on Sunday night the 27th, the total number of New England plant observations needing IDs stands at 577,458, a decrease of 12,477 from 48 hours ago. The number of species-level observations is currently 260,883, down 10,961 from Friday night. Simply astonishing! MUCH more than the usual effort on a February weekend (remember, last weekend the total number only decreased by 916 and the species-level number by 557).

(TEN THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-ONE!!!)

I was also able to figure out that at least 518 verifiable New England plant observations were added to iNaturalist on Saturday and Sunday (plus some unknown number added Friday evening). So I think we can safely add 518 to the total number IDed above.

Thank you, everyone! I really enjoyed seeing so many notifications rolling in while I was working, and I bet you felt productive, too! I felt productive, but I also realized, not for the first time, how little I really know about New England plants – yikes. Time to study more this coming field season.

So, now what? Did you enjoy this? Learn something? Are you now hooked on making IDs? Have you resolved to take better photos for your own observations, to make life easier for identifiers? Are you sick of identifying and just want to get back out there and see real plants?

Do you want to do this again sometime? I figured late February was a good time to catch most botanically-inclined iNatters stuck at home, out of the field, so we could do this again next year at this time. Or would you prefer another time of the year? I’m happy to coordinate this sort of project again, if people want, or cooperate with other iNatters, for that matter.

A sobering thought: There are still hundreds of thousands of plant observations in New England that need IDs. Now, many – many! – of these can never be IDed to species, maybe not even to genus, but what are your thoughts on identifications going forward? One of the possibilities I’ve thought about are arranging coordination among active IDers, so that if, say, @patswain works on observations that are currently at Clethra and brings them to C. alnifolia, another identifier could come along right afterward and agree with Pat (assuming we do) and thus get the observation to Research Grade quickly. Or another possibility would be a project that concentrates on difficult-to-ID certain taxa every month, where we’d invite an expert to write a journal article that explains how to separate and actually ID various groups. Or we just start a Plant Identifiers of New England project, post our own observations to it, and work on helping each other out (because I suspect that among us we all post many plant observations every year). Or organize field trips, now that Covid is maybe, possibly, I hope calming down.

Or something else entirely? What do you think? less ↑