Description of problem :
Abbreviating names works like 80% of the time, but in some situations nothing shows up and the search results that do pop up are kind of odd… in this situation I tried to abbreviate Amelanchier arborea and it seems to have basically ignored the A. abbreviation? It only caught the ‘arborea’ and thus the target species isn’t displayed
Here’s an example of what the normal abreviation does when it is working properly; there’s only a few near-matches and it recognizes the S belonging to a genus:
i don’t think iNat’s search is designed to search specifically for names in a G. species pattern. instead, it seems to usually be searching for names which include words that begin with the letter combinations you input.
in your case, “arborea” begins with “a”. so the “a” is sort of redundant, and an “a arborea” search effectively is going to just return any taxon with “arborea” in the name.
but you can search for “ame arb”, and that should be more likely to return Amelanchier arborea as one of the first results:
3 letters and 3 letters works.
But you can also try with 2 and 2 letters - if it is a popular sp on iNat.
Even one letter works - L for Lepidoptera for example.
sa can - brings it up 7th on my list. If you often search for a few sp, try the shortest possible version to save yourself clicks.
