High School iNaturalist Project: admin questions and IDing

[protecthabitat]

Hi iNat community.
Thank you for putting up with some of the weird observations lately (ie feral hairless ferret, ornamental flowers, etc.). Tomorrow we have a big lesson on native versus non-native species so I'm hopeful that it will deepen their understanding of the importance of documenting native species.
If anyone has a bit of time to help ID my high school project (Montgomery High School Ecology Project) observations, I have a due date for observations tomorrow and Wednesday morning (so students are busy uploading right now and tomorrow before their project due date). They will also be very busy with their final iNat contest. The contest deadline is May 22 and I expect some serious competition the day and evening before (and even the morning of) the deadline.
Students are doing a better job at coming up with their best ID guess this time around. As instructed, they are also doing a better job communicating online with their group members (they all "follow" each other). However, now they are quickly figuring out how they can make each others incorrect (although not necessarily in a premeditated manner yet?) IDs into research grade. I'm wondering, what is the best way to quickly "undo" some of these incorrectly IDed observations? When I add the correct ID, I see it still remains research grade. Am I missing something?
Thanks! Julie ("protecthabitat")

[Ken-ichi]

Hey Julie,

In theory the switch to and from research grade should be immediate
after you add an ID. If you can provide the URL of an observation
where this hasn't happened, I can look into it.

I think the way to deal with inaccurate IDs is for hope that the rest
of the community adds better ones. I'm not sure if we have enough
users to do that effectively yet, but we'll see.

-ken-ichi

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[Charlie Hohn]

I have wondered about this subject for a different reason.. I found an
observation that was quite old and I believed the ID was wrong (a
minor subspecies difference, but still) and commented and added my ID,
but I wished there was a way to 'ping' the other users - I don't think
they ever noticed the ID I added and it never was changed (nor was any
comment made to indicate I was wrong, which is of course also
possible). Of course the system can and will improve, and I agree, so
far there aren't enough people doing IDs... I can see how it is
'funner' to add observations, but peer ID review is important. I have
been trying to ID lots of plants, but I've been busy, and
unfortunately iNat doesn't work that well on an iPad (much of my
browsing is on an iPad because I commute on a bus with wifi.

[Julie Byrne]

I love the ping idea.
A little issue I'm facing now (mainly with my non-academic biology class "2") is that students are attempting to ID at least to kingdom such as "plants" (as instructed) but they forget to click the ID link after searching for the ID name. When I suggest a specific scientific name, it goes to research grade even though they don't deserve to have a generic "plants" ID as a research grade observation. I try to encourage them to revisit their observations regularly but they will see that it's research grade so they see no need to agree to my more specific ID (kids these days!). Are there any tricks to avoid this "general research grade ID"? (or anyway to undo it?)
Also, is there a way I could quickly see the number of "research grade" observations incorporated into a project from a student (without manually counting them)?
Finally, some of my top contributors shows to have more observations (including research grade observations) than they actually do according to my official way of reading their observations which is going through the project and then their username link. They actually have fewer observations because they didn't add all observations to the project and/or uncheck "ID please". Any fancy tricks to minimize this issue? I always tell them to check their observations through our project page (rather than their general account but I just thought I'd ask about tricks!)
Julie

[Charlie Hohn]

Not sure about the other questions but you can search for only a
person's research quality observations by going to the search option
after you view a person's observations. This may also be possible
through a project, I'm not sure.

It might make sense at some point for the site designers to add a
check box for 'ID at least to genus/species/family/whatever'

> <naturalist.char...@gmail.com>wrote:

[Ken-ichi]

Hi Julie,

> days!). Are there any tricks to avoid this "general research grade ID"? (or
> anyway to undo it?)

Our concept of "research grade" doesn't include a concept of taxonomic
rank. If your student identifies something as a mammal and you
identify it as Homo sapiens, then you both agree that the mammal
identification is correct, so iNat has reason to believe that ID is
accurate.

> Also, is there a way I could quickly see the number of "research grade"
> observations incorporated into a project from a student (without manually
> counting them)?

Well, kind of. With a user id you can do something like

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/project/montgomery-high-school-ecology-project?quality_grade=research&user_id=1045

but that's a bit of a pain. If you're good with Excel you can
download the project's observations as CSV by going to the project
page and clicking "All CSV" in the upper right. There are quality
grade and user login columns you can use to sort and filter. However,
it seems like you'd like some kind of project user stats page, which
seems broadly applicable. I'm guessing you'd want # observations, #
research grade, # research grade identified to species or lower...
anything else?

> Finally, some of my top contributors shows to have more observations
> (including research grade observations) than they actually do according to
> my official way of reading their observations which is going through the
> project and then their username link. They actually have fewer observations
> because they didn't add all observations to the project and/or uncheck "ID
> please". Any fancy tricks to minimize this issue?

So do you mean the numbers at
http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/montgomery-high-school-ecology-project/contributors
are inaccurate, or do you mean those numbers are showing total
contributions and not just research-grade ones?

-ken-ichi

[Ken-ichi]

FYI, apparently we already hade a sort of project member stats page,
it just wasn't that easy to get to. It should not be linked from the
leaderboard and members pages of each project. Julie, here's your
page in the Montgomery HS project:

http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/montgomery-high-school-ecology-project/contributors/protecthabitat

-ken-ichi