Identification "expertise"
I've been thrilled to be invited as a validator to iNaturalist's experiments to estimate the accuracy of observation IDs (v0.1, v0.2, v0.3). There has been a lot of discussion in the comments sections on the corresponding blog posts on how to determine whether someone is qualified to validate identifications on iNaturalist. (The details on how this was done are in the methods sections for each experiment.)
There have been suggestions to leave it to the "local/taxon experts" which has me wondering: Where and what am I focusing on when identifying on iNaturalist? So this journal entry is just here to illustrate that and collate a few links and resources for future reference. Firstly, let me confess that I'm not an expert on anything. I'm just someone who got hooked on doing identifications on iNaturalist. It's sort of my way to virtually "go for a walk" when I need to decompress and do something hopefully useful for others while doing so. I also find that I'm learning a ton while doing this. There may be some older IDs out there that I made early on in this learning process, so don't hesitate to ask or correct me if you come across one of my IDs that seems wrong.
I found the best overview of where people focus their identifications is using the identifications heat map. To get your own, use this URL and replace my user name with yours:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/map?ident_user_id=annkatrinrose#2/0/0
Here's a snapshot of my identifications as of March 2024:
A couple of things to note:
1) Obviously my hotspot is in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. This is where I do most of my identifications and feel most comfortable claiming I know a few things. I still keep discovering stuff new to me though.
2) The secondary hotspot in Denmark is coming from sorting out unknowns over there a while back when that country was a hotspot for unknowns. I don't think it is quite that hotspot any more, and I'm not really an expert in that area.
3) Most of the IDs I made in Africa were coarse IDs of plants to angiosperm, dicot, or monocot for the purpose of annotating phenology (which is not available on Plantae).
4) A lot of my IDs scattered around the globe outside of the areas mentioned above are for cultivated Venus flytraps. I don't really know much, if anything, about the local flora in these places.
Another indicator for "expertise" might be what taxa someone specializes on. I'm not really a specialist on anything in particular, but I do way more plant identifications than anything else. The following is a screenshot of my current (March 2024) top taxa identified. The ones marked in green were also on a top 10 list I made in November 2022, and the red one indicates the top cultivated one (not surprisingly the aforementioned Venus flytraps).
I use my "favorites" list to keep a record of the taxa for which I found myself to be either the top observer or top identifier, so that is another place to check to see what I've been interested in or focused on. I've occasionally used links posted on the forum to get my data for identification species counts and observation species counts. (To get your own, follow the links and replace my user name in the URL with yours.) I found these useful to check my counts against the overall counts to find likely candidates for which I might be the top identifier/observer.
