Hi! I’m quite new so sorry if something like this is already widely known!
It’s quite easy to see the most common species in an area on iNaturalist, which is especially useful to find out what to look out for when visiting a new place, but it’s not exactly what I’m usually looking for.
After all, the top species tends to be full of common species of squirrels and pigeons I could find in any number of places, and I’m more excited by the prospect of spotting a rare species.
What I want to know is what species have the highest proportion of their total observations in a given place. I managed to kind of inelegantly hack something overcomplicated up, but it’s not too bad and it’s already been super useful and fun to play around with, so I thought I’d share it! (Huge thanks to jumear for the API tool)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vITGyxWzWDXtFoEWT2wdBf2-FwLZrgDdTI5bm_FZWbY/edit?usp=sharing
This describes my method! Sorry if it overexplains some of the stuff on the iNaturalist side of things, I tried to target a general audience that may not be familiar with the site.
For example, I was able to learn that a quarter of all Ridgway’s Rail observations were here in the East Bay, so I’ll probably set out to photograph some of those pretty soon!
I’m sure something much cleaner and faster could be whipped up with some coding ability and knowledge of the API, but this works for my purposes and isn’t too bad,I think it’s especially useful for planning trips and the like.