Quick Links:
Introduction
You can still help out on iNaturalist in many ways, even if you know almost nothing about identifying stuff. Here's a list of ways you can do that. I am going to try and make this as simple as possible for new people to get involved.
Before doing anything else, you're going to need to make and be logged into your iNaturalist account.
I'm giving links to both the Observations page and the Identify page where possible. The Identify page offers more functionality when using a desktop. These links will ignore the "default place," if you've set one, and will display the results in random order. You can change these settings.
1. Add Observations
This is the most obvious one, but I wanted to talk about it a little bit and add a few notes that may be helpful.
All you really need to make observations on iNaturalist is a cell phone with a camera and/or recording app. Other things help, but you don't need them.
Finding Life Forms
You don't need to go far. You can start with the pigeons in the parking lot, or the spider your cat just killed, or the mold on the burrito that you forgot about for months. Here are some general tips:
Bugs:
- Shine a flashlight along the surface of the ground, a rock, etc. to easily see shadows of bugs on that surface.
- Leave a light on outside at night and wait for the bugs that are attracted to it.
Recording Life Forms
Sometimes people add photos or audio that are not really very useful for identifying the organism. To make your observations more identifiable, include as many of these factors as possible:
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Animal signs: environment/surroundings; size; it can be helpful to break scat apart with a stick and see what it contains
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Plants: the size and shape of the entire plant; leaf shapes, leaf edges, how the leaves connect to the stem; flowers, outside and inside, from multiple angles; what parts of the plant (flower stems? bottoms of the leaves?) are smooth, and what parts have hair; sizes of plant parts; habitat; smell
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Spiders: eye arrangement; locations and numbers of leg spines; top down shot; bottom up shot, if possible. The most important thing is to get the photos in focus.
Posting Observations
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If you're using the mobile app, turn off autosync. I don't know anyone who uses or likes it.
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Your observations are a record of YOUR location, too. Make sure to obscure observations that are at your house or work, and don't post observations with public locations while you're still at that location.
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Crop your photos. Pleeeeeease.
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Some people don't like seeing pictures of injured/dead animals when scrolling through their observations. If you're one of those people, you can put a warning for the first photo of your observation, and the warning will show up as the thumbnail rather than the gory image.
2. Add Broad IDs to Unknowns
One way to help is taking observations that don't have any IDs and putting a really basic ID on them, like "Birds." This helps the people who ID birds find it; they aren't looking at the unknowns, they're looking at the birds.
When you add an ID to something, by default, it gets marked as Reviewed. "Reviewed" is just a flag for you to keep track of what you've already looked at. There's a checkbox at the bottom of the observation below the comment box (on desktop) that you can check or un-check. I like to un-check it when I give things IDs like "Birds" because I like to reserve it for things that I have researched as much as possible.
Troubleshooting:
This observation has multiple life forms in it: There is some debate about the best way to handle these observations. What I do is leave a little note that says something like "Welcome to iNaturalist! This observation file has several different species in it. iNaturalist works best with one species per observation file. You may want to consider splitting this into multiple observations." and then mark it as reviewed and move on.
This observation is not a life form (or is captive, etc): You can go to the Data Quality Analysis section and click the thumbs-ups or thumbs-downs to flag the observation correctly. (In Identify, the DQA section is under the tab at the top right; on the Observation page, it's all the way at the bottom of the page; and you get to it through the Mobile app by opening the observation and then tapping "Data Quality".)
I added an ID but it still says Unknown: The poster might have chosen to "opt out of the community taxon," which means it's just going to stay marked as Unknown no matter what ID you put on it. There isn't currently a way to filter out these observations. I'd just mark it as Reviewed (so it doesn't show up every time you're looking for Unknowns to ID) and keep going.
I don't know what this is, but I know that an expert in a specific topic might: You can join a project that relates to that topic and then add the observation to that project.
I have no idea what this is: You can identify it as Life if you want to. I just mark it as Reviewed and move on.
3. Add Annotations
Observations on iNaturalist also have "annotations" attached to them. Annotations are things like the sex of the organism, or whether the plant is flowering. When you open the observation in your browser, it will be the list on the right side of the screen below the community taxon thing (which is below the map). Annotations are useful, but unfortunately, they are underused.
What annotations are available for an observation depends on what the community taxon ID is. Some annotations show up for taxa they aren't supposed to, with no options when you try to pick one. Just ignore those. iNaturalist is a little buggy.
I think it's better to leave annotations for sex and life stage out until the observation gets to Research Grade. Maybe the male X looks like the female Y, or the juvenile A looks like the adult B. When the observation is Research Grade, you're less likely to have such a mistake because it's more certain what species you're looking at.
Add annotations for Life Stage:
Some species have young that look very different from adults. The group where this is most obvious is in insects who go through all the stages of egg-larva-pupa-adult.
- Observations of holometabolous insects that are missing the Life Stage annotation: observations | identify
Add annotations for Sex:
Some animals have males and females that look different enough that you can tell them apart from photos, and you can add Male or Female. Other species have very similar-looking adults, and you can add Cannot Be Determined.
- Incomplete reference of sexually dimorphic species: view list
- Observations for the above species that are missing the Sex annotation: observations | identify
- (Observations for all species that are missing the Sex annotation: observations | identify )
