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That was an awesome event. Thanks so much Amy!

This was fun! And exhausting, even though I took breaks. Let's do it again!

My 1 ID of a mud pot to sulfolobus makes Archaea the biggest % change lol

Maybe I'm just sick of clearing Unknowns, but I think it would be fun to have a blitz where we move as many Needs ID observations to Research Grade as possible. Maybe even pair up, if possible, so if, for example, I can take an observation from genus to species, my ID partner could then come along and bump it to Research Grade. Then we could switch and I'd bump their IDs onward to Research Grade.

Does that make any sense? Probably not, I'm a little bleary-headed here, I can't imagine why.

@lynnharper That sounds fun, although it might be hard to find the right participants. You'd need people who thought they knew enough about whatever taxon in whatever area to confidently produce RG. Certainly I wouldn't want to encourage people to jump to RG if they didn't actually have certainty in the IDs.

@vireyajacquard I think the profile page stats just take a while to regenerate, which is why they're often out of sync with the IDs page.

@vireyajacquard yes, one of the pages counts all ids and another only those that active now.

The Unknown link never did load for me. But I worked thru the other links. Mostly, frustrating, mark as reviewed, next.

Then I tweaked the URLs to Africa, and ploughed on till I hit that barrier where others have tried and failed.

But, each obs that moved, even one taxon level, was rewarding to do! Thanks, Amy.
My favourite was a 'four leaved clover' in Brazil - which is Marsilea, helicopter fern.

@lynnharper but you need to consider how wide that something is and how well ided this by others, plus geography.

@lynnharper @arboretum_amy I think it'd be fun to organize something to move to research grade, even by pairs. @elschongar Imagine if we worked together to ID mulleins in tandem...I could ID the pieces I know, you could finish them off, perhaps you could find an expert to get to RG those that don't quite make it.

Or, @marina_gorbunova, I could ID to insects, and you could narrow further, and perhaps I could learn something about moving beyond just a "winged insect" IDs.

@peakaytea yeah, I asked a couple of times on the forum if someone wants to go through insects, if you're interested, I'm sure open to collaborate!

@peakaytea, you were one of the people I was thinking of! Let's start thinking about this for real (maybe February?) and I definitely want @arboretum_amy in on this, too.

@lisa_bennett personally I want to clear them all down to orders (or lower where possible), for that I'm ok with anything that others want to do, I can check all ids at those level and lower or just be happy to have somebody else going through them with me, they're at 117,5k now and most of them are not hard ones like mines and galls, and as there're now 30k of viewed by me but still at insecta/pterygota, if a person wants to add another id to push them further, that would be much appreciated too.

All the ideas and collaboration make me so happy. Anyone who wants to create working groups, events, or both, know that I would be happy to provide a logistical/planning backbone and resources. And of course, much thanks to Amy and Michele for their hard work. I was barely involved this time.

Speaking of, I am hoping to set up a round 3 of mentorship. It's still experimental of course. Anyone who can offer even a few minutes of help (eg fill in a test form so I can have sample data), or who wants to be more involved, please let me know. Work will only begin in earnest after Jan 3rd or so for a target date of late January or early February.

@dianastuder for me it was too much screen time (even with blue light filter) AND a cold front passing through AND got my Covid booster on Friday. I took my extra meds (on top of my daily stuff) but it didn't help at all.

I'm so sorry to hear we had multiple migraine attacks from the event! I've never gotten one from screen time, but I suffer about 2 episodes per year.

I will now go back to my regular habit of doing a few pages of unknowns a day. I have a system I've using for a while, based on dates of uploads. Because what I am looking at has been well picked-over, most are plants, which I'm happy to get to family if I can. (Until this blitz I have generally left alone the ones I could only recognise as dicots or monocots. But perhaps now I will add those IDs too.) I love to find something amongst old unknowns like a snake or a frog that many people must have seen but not noticed before. Some of those can go to research grade very quickly once they are out of "unknown". It is a shame that the observer did not give them a basic ID when they uploaded them.

I hope all of you suffering headaches are feeling better soon!

Maybe harder, but it would be interesting to have an event refining observations between phylum and class (or phylum and order). This event definitely (and not at a all surprisingly) increased the stuff at those ranks. Some like phylum tracheophyta do have a significant fraction of broadly easy things to refine, mixed with a fraction where it seems relatively obvious that 'cannot be improved' would be appropriate, like a small chunk of wood or a pile of miscellaneous plant litter with no obvious target. Some other areas are obviously much harder and would require specific expertise to refine or even be confident refinement isn't possible.

Cool @sue1001! I might try to help with that, it sounds like fun. May I suggest an edit to your "keep them cleared" link though? Currently you're using iconic_taxa=unknown, but that also includes things like protozoans that have no iconic taxon of their own. I usually use identified=false instead, which will only bring up observations without IDs. If you want to include observations at State of Matter Life as well, you could use https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?iconic_taxa=unknown&without_taxon_id=47126%2C47170%2C1%2C47686%2C48222%2C67333%2C131236%2C151817

@paloma as soon as the community ID is anything other than "unknown" or "state of matter life" it is no longer included in the project - so it will no longer show up in the "keep them cleared link." I was really just focused on that first sort - getting observations from "Unknown" to someplace they can actually be identified.

Do you think there is a need for subsequent identifiers to find them? That might take a whole other project? I'd be interested to better understand what's needed there...

Actually I've realized I don't need to use Mara's link because the project rules accomplish the same thing, so...

Original link with no Life and a few glitch taxa: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=100&iconic_taxa=unknown&order=asc&without_taxon_id=48460&project_id=123773&place_id=any

Or "pure unknowns" only https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=100&identified=false&order=asc&project_id=123773&place_id=any

Or put the Life back in: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=100&iconic_taxa=unknown&order=asc&project_id=123773&place_id=any

I also have been working on expanding the contiguous blob off and on. Using the definition of 'contiguous zone' for crossing waterways, it now includes the entire coastline of the arctic ocean, and borders the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans on both sides. Depending on whether you consider South Africa or Chile to count as touching the southern ocean thats as far as it can be expanded in terms of touching oceans; clearing South Africa by itself would probably take about as long as clearing every Mexican State/country in a path to Chile. @sue1001 I don't think New York, Quebec, or Arizona are in your project yet but they are all clear as of this moment. Washington, Minnesota, Vermont, and Missouri each have only a few hundred unknowns left and would expand the blob, and once Missouri is cleared Mississippi, and Louisiana are both very manageable.

I am still chewing down for the Western Cape. Skimming back in time, it seems we are more or less managing to keep up somehow (mostly from 2021 which surprised me).
And SO rewarding each time another obs moves taxons! I have about 1K to go and enjoying that. Beyond Cape Town there are many quieter rural areas that seem not to have been seen for IDs at all.

Following my notifications from the active project. Where I added an ID to help move it in the right direction, I am now often deleting my no longer useful ID - for places beyond the Western Cape. Even 'the rest of South Africa' takes me to so much I don't know.

I've been working on southeast Texas which is really hard to finish because of Houston. I can probably keep up with Louisiana. I prefer to do areas where I know what I'm looking at and don't have to leave something at a high level ID.

The number of observations which were identified the during this event and also currently at RG has risen from 3855 on the day the event ended to 4,472 observations just now.