ID Contest
You are mentioned because I would like you to take a look at an ID contest I am holding.
This seems to be the best way to get these ID's done. We need a community effort- so let's hold an Identifying contest. Starting December 1st, I'm holding a competition to Identify Animals. The ID Animals contest opens 12/1/2017. Your ID Total is that shown at Inaturalist.org/observations. In order to qualify, you must Identify the most observations ADDED in December 2017. We need to ID fast enough to avoid this active time being buried in the spring.
Scoring System:
8 Insect
6 Snails and slugs
4 Mammal
4 Reptile
4 Bird
No points are awarded for non-animals
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i am confused. Pretty much all my IDs are plant ids. Are you talking about all animals ever?
Hmm, seems like a good idea. I'll attempt to take part as well if you do not mind
Hello Danny,
I won't really be able to help very much with this, because currently I am packing and prepping -- next week on the 7th I am going away for 16 days on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and I will be too busy to do very much except upload my own observations.
BTW: How come insects get 10 points, whereas gastropods (slugs and snails that are from saltwater, freshwater and the land) are second only to insects in number of species worldwide, get only 2 points?
And will you be counting only the first ID on something, or does agreeing with other people's IDs count?
Each of your questions:
@charlie, the idea is to ID ones from the month of december DURING december
@cliygh-and-mia I most certainly don't mind help!
@susanhewitt Gastropods are less observed- more observations is more points. Your Gastropod Won't get buried
My opinion is that birds are the least in need of IDs and plants probably the most. Keeping it to the animal only theme then I'd go with:
6 Insect
6 Snails and slugs (these REALLY need the attention)
4 Mammal
4 Reptile
2 Bird
@susanhewitt agreeing counts.
@silversea_starsong, I agree, but let's go 4 bird and 8 insect. Thanks! Changing it.
another snubbed plant person here ; )
IMO supporting/maverick IDs should be excluded from such a contest, but I'm not sure it's possible yet to calculate those stats
Just want to encouraged trying to ID and more just paying attention , not necessarily improving @bouteloua
i'd give 56 points to each plant ID and 1 point to each animal ID.
But yeah leading IDs do seem the best for this @bouteloua because too much gamification of maverick IDs may lead to weird bad ones. Though of course sometimes the maverick is right.
In any event i don't think i have any valuable animal ID expertise so i'll just be doing my normal plant IDs. Doesn't seem worth my time making high level 'insecta' IDs when i could be identifying plants :) Good to see some discussion in here though
@dannym @silversea_starsong If you don't mind changing it one more time, I think amphibians should probably be worth 5 points, as although they're usually seen less frequently than other animal groups, they do sometimes provide a challenge to identify (The many species of Desmognathus or Plethodon are good North American examples of this), and as such, pin-pointing down an ID could be a feat in it's own right. But that is my own opinion, I'll let others agree or disagree first.
"Other" animals than those listed should probably be 10 pts !
I'll do my best!
More plant points! ;) And bugs - there are lots and lots and lots of bugs that need ID’s — although, these can be waaay harder to get down to species; even bugguide leaves many of those at the genus level (if even down that far).
Points would be hard to keep track of — would this be the participants that would have to keep track, or would you calculate the scores at the end, Danny?
And yep, lots of new observations, but not nearly as many ID’ers: https://www.inaturalist.org/stats
Bugs are (relatively) easy to identify to standard levels though, so that's why I think they don't need to be rated too high.
Yeah time to ID has crept down a little bit but not recovered from the big influx of users a while back. I think it catches up a little in the winter because a lot of places not much gets added in the winter. I barely do any iNat November-March in terms of observations... just IDs.
@dannym what was the purpose of excluding plants (and fungi) anyhow? i find that my animal observations get IDs way faster than plant ones. Especially bird ones.
@charlie — I wonder which taxon group on iNat is the least ID’ed group...? My guess would be fungi, but plants have got to be up there. The vertebrates that I post are usually ID’ed pretty quick, but some of those odd plants rest for eons. Fungi I’ve almost given up on (despite a few species) — I can’t seem to get the right angles for ID’s.
Anyways, I’ll sure try my best to ID as much as I can — although, I must admit, I stick pretty close to my own region of the world. Texas observations can indeed keep one busy! ;)
Slime moulds must be one of the least identified groups.
Yeah. Fungi are hard because you need different views plus spore print or whatever for a lot of them. Problem is, most of the biomass is underground in mycelia we can't see, we only see the fruiting bodies. It's like trying to ID a plant where you can see flowers and fruit but no leaves or bark ever.
In general it is often not hard at all to put some sort of high-level ID on something that currently has no ID at all, as long as the photos are clear, and assuming there is an indication of scale in one of the images. And it's not that difficult to "agree" with a lot of IDs either, because one can rapidly consult other images of the taxon, the distribution map, the Wikipedia article and so on.
The challenging thing is getting a lot of the less common and less distinctive invertebrates, fungi, and algae, not to mention all the hundreds of thousands of more obscure and less obvious plants, down to the SPECIES level all by yourself, either from scratch, or from the phylum or family level. I can do that easily with a lot of marine mollusks from the faunas I know well, only because that is one of my areas of expertise.
But I can't much improve my output on ID-ing, as I am already working to maximum ability in the time available to me.
Perhaps this kind of competition should not be aimed at those who already make the most identifications, but at the people who are doing well so far, but are still developing their iNat skills and identification skills?
yeah, that is true. Even if plants are included, the only thing I'd maybe change would be to do IDs for December instead of working through old ones. Which doesn't really cause any positive change.
@charlie i changed it to be for december only.
@sambiology i'll use the identifiers search at inat/observations and keep track of it.
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