Welcome to the 2021 May ID-athon!

Hello everyone and welcome to the 2021 May ID-athon. If you participated in the Jan-Feb ID-athon, it is great to see you again! If you are new, we are happy you can join us! Please review the rules. Are you ready? Let's go!

The Main Event: Unknowns

By popular demand, our main target for these nine days is to identify as many unknown observations as possible. As an initial goal, we will try to clear approximately 10,000 unknowns, and we're providing you with a link to find those. The link sorts by random, so that you won't all be identifying the same observations at once.

The 10,000 unknowns in this link represent our starting goal. If we meet this goal (which should be easy!) we will continue on to our "stretch goals" of 12,000 unknowns, then 15,000, and so on.

We met the 10,000 goal! Great! On to the 12,000 goal--Belgium has now been added.

We met the 12,000 goal! Costa Rica and Czechia have been added. The next goal is 15,000.

We met the 15,000 goal! China, Portugal and Peru are added. Our next goal is 20,000.

Each time the goal goes up, more countries are added to the list. The additional countries have already been chosen, so no requests. For each goal and stretch goal we hit, there will be a better (communal) prize.

The link uses a set list of countries each of which have a medium number of observations and IDs. They are not the most popular places on iNaturalist, but also not places with very few users. Some of these places have only 5 unknowns, others have over a thousand -- the sum of their unknowns is a little over 10,000 as of now.

The countries are:

Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Austria, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Botswana, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, Eswatini, Fiji, Georgia, Greece, Guam, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

UPDATE 25 May 2:12 AM UTC: Belgium added
UPDATE 25 May 7:30 PM UTC: Costa Rica and Czechia added

Categories

Besides the main target of identifying unknowns, many of you have signed up for additional categories, which were summarized in the rules post. Any of the IDs you make during the dates of the event count for these categories, even if they are not made on unknowns.

Improvement

TL;DR: The goal is to identify more per day than you normally have before the ID-a-thon

Here is a link to your individual baselines -- (your average IDs per day).

How scoring works: If your baseline is 100, and you maintain 105 a day for the event, your score is 105(%). If your baseline is 50, and you maintain 55 a day for the event, your score is 110(%).

If you identify fewer than your average you’re probably not going to be a top scorer, but, for example, if your baseline is 100 and you manage 90 per day if the event, your score would be 90(%). Which, by the way, is still great.

As noted, if your baseline would have been below 20, it was set to 20. Otherwise it’s too easy for newbies – for example, if your baseline were 1, and you maintained 6 a day, your score would be 600(%) which is not exactly fair.

Mystery

If you signed up to participate in the Mystery challenge, here are the hints to the three Mystery categories:

• Searching for Amy and Blue
• The known unknowns
• A few of our favorite things

Note these are three separate mystery categories, one hint for each. We will be revealing the exact parameters at the end of the event.

Have fun! There is a separate prize pool for power-identifiers so have no fear and do your best.

Old Observations

The most straightforward of them all. Has this been on iNaturalist more than five years? Put an ID on it. Same as the Mystery category, power-identifiers have a separate prize pool. Link to qualifying observations.

Consistency

Identify every day, if you can. Remember that days are counted according to UTC+0.
If you miss one day, you still get a prize, but a less awesome one. If you miss two, you get a mini prize. More than that, well… good luck next time.

Beginners’ Challenge.

Prizes will be given to each of the 'beginners' participating in the project who complete challenges. At least two challenges must be met to get a prize -- thereafter, the more challenges you complete, the better the prize(s).
Challenges are:

• Reaches 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, or 600 total IDs. (IDs from before the event don't count as completing the challenge)
• Has more than 50% Improving IDs during the event.
• Makes an ID on observations in five separate continents.
• Makes an ID on an observation of a vertebrate animal, an invertebrate animal, a plant, and a fungus.

Good luck everyone. Get identifying!

If you want to chat with your fellow ID-athon competitors, whether to collaborate or ask questions etc., use the following link to join our Discord. First thing you should do is say hi on #greetings and link to your iNat profile so we know you're not a rando.
https://discord.gg/xJZnpVtrwf

Posted on 22 de maio de 2021, 12:00 AM by astra_the_dragon