A query that will find unobserved species in a smaller place that exists inside a larger place?

Hey yall!

I have been working for years to build up a count of species diversity in our local wetland park, the Exploration Green Conservancy. I know there are some local species that we have overlooked, as well as others to be on the lookout for because they would likely appear in the boundaries. In order to find a list of what we might be missing, I’d like compare what we have in the wetland to the larger area. The wetland is within the much larger Greater Clear Lake Area which has very similar ecology.

Is there a way to narrow down the species that exist in the Greater Clear Lake Area place to the species not observed in the Exploration Green Conservancy place? I’ve tried looking at some of the url queries but I’m struggling to find one that works correctly.

1 Like

I had that exact thought a while ago and put together a little web app that makes that query for you called “easily missed”. There’s an iNat forum thread here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/a-tool-to-help-you-fill-local-data-gaps-easily-missed/37575

It uses a ‘doughnut’ shape rather than using iNat ‘places’, I did start making it configurable for using place ID’s but can’t remember how far I got… You can make radii larger or smaller to hopefully fulfil your needs

You can access the app here: https://simonrolph.github.io/easily_missed/

Hope this helps!

5 Likes

Oh nice, this does help a lot. I can probably filter those results a bit and have a good list to start with. Thanks!

1 Like

I would have done it a bit differently, although this may be more steps. I would have, first, done a place search for the Greater Clear Lake Area, gotten the species list for that; second, search just the Exploration Green Conservancy, gotten the species list for that; finally, compared the two lists.

if the checklists for Exploration Green Conservancy and Greater Clear Lake are accurate – which is not necessarily true – you could compare those checklists in the system (without downloading the lists) to find unobserved species in Exploration Green: https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/4419264-Exploration-Green-Conservancy-Check-List/compare?page=5&utf8=✓&with=2463558

otherwise, to compare species from two places, you could use the general process i described here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/first-observation-on-inat-of-a-certain-species/44845/12, which would effectively compare 2 sets of taxa noted in the “species” section of the Explore webpage.

@kildor has some tools that don’t quite address the case here but potentially could be modified to address it exactly…

2 Likes

Could you explain a bit more what do you want to reach?
You have two places/projects and want to have list of species in project A missed in B?
Or, even better, you want to compare two lists of species?
I don’t have such tool, but you can download list of all species via https://kildor.name/inat/species, and try to compare it by hand or something like exel.

I think I’m able to write such tool, but can’t promise any ETA.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.