How to help identify species for SGI projects in iNaturalist
iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. It also can serve as a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool. Observations must include photos, locations, and dates to eventually qualify as “research grade.” Every observation with those things gets automatically placed in the "Needs ID" category. "Research Grade" status for an observation is reached when the community agrees on species-level ID or lower, i.e. when more than 2/3 of identifiers agree on a taxon (at minimum three people).
To help identify species for SGI projects in iNaturalist, you will need to first find observations that need identification and then filter to find SGI project observations.
Go to the SGI home page on iNaturalist.
Review the list of more than 120 SGI projects and remember the name of one that you’d like to work on.
Next hit the “identify” tab in the top menu on iNaturalist. (Note that projects showing the SGI logo were originated by SGI, but many other projects initiated by other organizations are within our geographic boundaries and provide equally valuable information.)
4. The “identify” tab takes you to a list of all iNaturalist observations that need identification. Next select “filters” next to the search box.
5. The filter box will show “Needs ID” has already been selected. Now select “more filters” and search for your chosen SGI project (Northern Coastal Prairies is shown), which will autopopulate.
6. Once you have filtered your results, you can start identifying!
7. Ways to identify:
a. You can either click agree directly from the list of filtered observations.
b. You can select an individual observation for more detail and to leave comments (lower right)
c. You can search for a single species (if that’s your specialty) to obtain all the observations of that species and quickly review.
