Help us identify!
After 4 days of intense observation-making, we've moved on to the uploading & identifying portion of the City Nature Challenge. The identifying is something that EVERYONE can help with, whether or not your city participated in the City Nature Challenge! There are many ways to help with IDs, making it easy for anyone to join in:
- There are over 43,000 observations with no ID at all. Even if you don't know much about identifying organisms down to species, with these observations it's HUGELY helpful to go through and do high-level classifications, e.g., "plants" or "lizards" or "birds" so that the people who do know these groups of organisms can more easily find these observations and ID them.
- More than half of the observations submitted for the City Nature Challenge still need help with IDs! You can help by confirming IDs that have already been made, refining IDs from general (e.g. "plants") to more specific (e.g. "red maple"), and correcting mis-identifications. You can filter these observations to taxa you're familiar with in places that you know - see the video below.
- As you're going through observations, you can also help by marking observations as captive/cultivated if it's obvious that it's a photo of a pet or a captive animal (e.g., animals in zoos or aquaria), or a plant that has been planted and is being taken care of (e.g., plants in pots or a garden bed).
Here's a short video on how to use the identify page: