Great Lakes Unknownathon (October 2020)

Help Identify!

"Unknown" observations don't have any identification label at all. Many people helping identify observations on iNaturalist will filter the observations by the group of species they know how to ID (like "plants" or "insects"), so observations with no ID at all yet will be excluded from those filtered searches. Putting in a general ID helps funnel the observation to someone who might know what they're looking at so that it can get identified more quickly.

Baseline stats:


61,809 observations in the Great Lakes region without an ID

And state/province by state/province:

Let's see how low we can get these numbers by the end of October!

View a quick tutorial on how to efficiently use the Identify page here.

*Tallying observations posted to iNat before Sept 30th, 2020.

Questions:

Why the Great Lakes region?
It's where I find most interesting. :) And...I don't feel like tallying stats for more places. Though someone could probably write some simple code to tally these automatically for a bunch of places at a time, like every state or every country!

Do I have to know anything about how to identify stuff in this region?
No! Even a basic identification, like "frog", "mammal", or "flowering plant" will help other identifiers find these observations better.

I want to hang out and chitchat with other iNatters while I'm IDing unknowns. Where can I do that?
Check out the main iNaturalist Discord server or the Great Lakes Botany server.

Someone said something snarky, like "duh" or "obviously, but I want to know which species" when I added a coarse ID to their observation - what should I do?
These people usually don't understand yet how identifications work on iNaturalist. Sometimes it's best to just not respond at all, but one option is to use or modify the commonly used response for this situation. There are several listed here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/responses#addid You might even consider using some boilerplate text as you are adding IDs with some quick copy/pasting. If it was a really inappropriate comment (check the Community Guidelines), always feel comfortable flagging the comment so a curator or iNat staff can take a look.

Wait, but some of these are your observations...
Hey, that's not a question. And, sorry.

Why do some species show up in the stats as unknowns?
They're waiting to be grafted by a curator/staff, or it's an unknown bug! Yay!

Help Identify!

Publicado el miércoles, 30 de septiembre de 2020 a las 11:46 PM por bouteloua bouteloua

Comentarios

You're the best, cassi. :)

Anotado por sambiology hace mas de 3 años

Thanks for this. Nice to be able to help out despite not being an expert.

Anotado por cae1 hace mas de 3 años

Follow-up (pre Nov. 2020 obs)

Minnesota: 3363 unknown observations (0.72% of all observations), a total of 424(+) IDs made, a 0.09% decrease) — help identify more!
Wisconsin: 4555 unknown observations (1.26% of all observations), a total of 495(+) IDs made, a 0.14% decrease) — help identify more!
Illinois: 6808 unknown observations (1.01% of all observations), a total of 814(+) IDs made, a 0.12% decrease) — help identify more!
Michigan: 6268 unknown observations (1.25% of all observations), a total of 1218(+) IDs made, a 0.25% decrease) — help identify more!
Indiana: 4259 unknown observations (1.54% of all observations), a total of 413(+) IDs made, a 0.15% decrease) — help identify more!
Ohio: 9990 unknown observations (1.04% of all observations), a total of 1406(+) IDs made, a 0.14% decrease) — help identify more!
Pennsylvania: 1089 unknown observations (0.13% of all observations), a total of 2663(+) IDs made, a 0.33% decrease) — help identify more!
New York: 4011 unknown observations (0.33% of all observations), a total of 2428(+) IDs made, a 0.2% decrease) — help identify more!
Ontario: 10212 unknown observations (0.54% of all observations), a total of 1393(+) IDs made, a 0.07% decrease) — help identify more!

Go Pennsylvania!!

Anotado por bouteloua hace mas de 3 años

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