One thing I would like to be able to do with collection projects is set them to display only the earliest observations of taxa from an area. That would be a useful way to alert people to when a new, or rare, species is detected in a new area. That could be newly detected natives or a newly arrived pests.
For example, I’d like to make projects with the earliest 10 observations, by observation date, of wild (not captive/cultivated) introduced plants in the cities, towns, and districts of New Zealand, and then gather them together in an umbrella project. The new observations showing up in that project would be the new potential weeds that others on iNat should be looking out for. It would be of use to our biosecurity agencies looking for new incursions that should be controlled.
I can see a similar thing working well for the first native species of a taxon observed in an area. For example, I could make a new wild native plants of Christchurch City project which would show which observations coming through of native plants that have not been observed here before, or had infrequently been observed here before. That would be interesting, and useful.
Currently, I struggle to track down these new observations on iNat without resorting to wrangling data off-site using the API. Having this as an added option to projects could be a handy way to bring prominence to newly observed species in areas.
More broadly, I could see this working across all of iNat if we had a grid of the world (eg 10 km by 10 km squares) and had a tag visible on all observations that are one of the earliest ten observations of each taxon in each grid square. Collection projects could then choose to just display observations with that tag for grid squares overlapping the project area.
A similar “new to iNat” feature has been requested before (eg https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/label-observation-as-an-inat-first/8346) but what I’m suggesting is making it the first few observations (eg the first 10, not just the first one), and localizing this to areas, and then making this available to collection projects.