I often read comments in this sub in the lines of "I want to help but I am not an expert in any taxa", "I have the ID skills of a 5 year old", "I am scared of making mistakes while IDing". The reality of iNat right now is that we need you and your basic skills desperately!
Experts often filter the IDing page to only see the taxa of their expertise, yet a lot of observations are sitting as "unknown", "animal", "life", etc, and will never reach these experts if the "clean up crew" (such as myself!) don't get them into the right queues to start with.
To make things super easy, I wanted to directly link some queues where you, yes you, can make a real difference
But what if I make a mistake?
Mistakes are ok as long as you are responsive when corrected!
If you marked some long forgotten observation as "insect" and someone else comes and marks "arachnid", first, you bought the observation to the attention of this arachnid guy! that's great! Now, if you think the other person is right, you just need to withdraw your ID or (If you realized that you can also confirm it's an arachnid now that you look better) you can change your ID for a more correct one.
Note that IDing is a much, MUCH easier and more pleasant experience on desktop. I highly recommend using a laptop/pc for this.
Things anybody can do:
(Partly curated from this great forum post and this other amazing forum post)
- Identify "unknowns" in your area with this link. Moving "unknowns" to any finer level is super important. Even if you can only tell that it's a plant or a bird or a mushroom, that is already moving it where specialist can find it easier. Tips for finer and better IDs:
- If it's an obviously decorative/cultivated plant or an obviously domestic/zoo/museum animal, mark the "captive/cultivated" checkbox
- If it's a selfie or the focal point is obviously a person, ID as Human (It will move to Casual automatically)
- If you kinda know what kind of thing it is, but don't know which "level" to choose, I find it easy to go to the "suggestions" tab and click on the name of a suggestion, it will open a page with the taxonomy of that suggestion. Then, pick a level that you are sure it has to be in (EG: the suggestions give you 4 different doves, click on the name of a dove species and select the Columbidae, which contains all pigeons/doves)
- More tips in this comment
- Bored of your area? Travel to a place with few identifiers! Here are the "Unknowns" of some places that seriously need the help of the cleanup crew: Cochabamba, Bolivia - Madre de Dios, PerĂș - Trinidad-Beni, Bolivia
- Help people notice that their observations are missing a date or location checking this link (it goes to non-captive casual observations w/photos in your area). If you see something that is not a captive/cultivated organism, you simply need to add a comment (instead of/alongside an ID) to the user telling them that their observation is missing the date/location, and to please add it so it can be seen by other people and move to Research grade.
- ...While you are at it, check if you didn't forget to add a date or location to your observations! use this link and change my username at the end with yours to see your casual observations. Anything that is not a captive/cultivated organism is probably missing something!: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=true&quality_grade=casual&photos=true&user_id=naelin
- Get started with annotations on your own observations! Annotations are a list of attributes in every observation and are very useful when people want to find photos/obs with certain attributes, such as checking how the larva of a certain insect or the seeds of a certain plant look like (it also helps people filter out dead animals that they may not want to see). You will not be able to add everything, but you will be able to add a lot! Use this link and change my username with yours at the end. Then use the "annotations" tab to add the annotations you can confidently tell to each obs: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?reviewed=true&quality_grade=needs_id%2Ccasual%2Cresearch&verifiable=any&without_term_id=22&place_id=any&user_id=naelin
- Use the map on the "explore" page to navigate to the nearest zoo/botanical garden in your area, and select to see only that place with the square/circle/places of interest buttons. Once there, click Filters, then "identify" to go to the identify page of the park, and move to captive/cultivated any pesky zoo animals or decorative flowers you see.
There are a lot more things you can do, but this will get you started. You will learn a lot by doing this, especially as you will start receiving notifications when other people refine your initial IDs (If you don't want this, you can change the notification settings in your profile).
If there is interest, I can make further posts/comments with more "anybody can help" kind of tasks. I hope you find this useful!
