Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: website
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: Your Home / Taxa / Places
Description of need:
Seeing cool developments in the community is inspiring and incentivizes doing difficult research into finding and identifying underrated taxa.
Sometimes I like clicking the “Real Time Discussions” tab on my dashboard to see all the fun discussions that people are having around the website. It would be cool if there was a similar feed somewhere to see when new species are added on iNat. More specifically I’m thinking when a new species ID is applied to an observation for the first time, there’s often a cool discussion associated with it and it would be cool to bring more attention to these kinds of conversations.
For example (based on the example from the thread above) maybe a tab on the Sciapodinae page, or a tab on the Sri Lanka place page that shows new taxa for the country as they’re added… or a way to subscribe to getting updates like this on your dashboard?
I’m not sure if you envisioned new species globally AND only globally, or if you also could see the value of new species by place (eg a feed showing when new species are first recorded for a country or state/county-equivalent). I would love to see that feed because, not only would it enable some positive celebration and discussion when it’s a supported new record as you suggest above, but I also think it might help catch over-agressive/incorrect IDs.
they sort of have this functionality already in some cases in the Discoveries section of the Trends tab in some taxon pages, but even when it’s available, it doesn’t work very reliably unfiltered, at a global level (probably because there are so many identification records). see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/automatically-adding-to-news-on-project/22028/4
when i use it filtered for my local metro area, about half the time there are new species identified, they’re incorrect IDs based on computer vision suggestions. another portion are cases when there are taxon changes, and occasionally you do get new species (but usually there’s not that much discussion in these observations, though maybe there would be more discussion if it was a first in the entire system, not just in a particular place).
I was thinking of place firsts as well, but this seems like the biggest complicating factor. I can imagine a popular CV suggestion from another continent being removed and re-added over and over again, and that kind of thing might be common enough that it dominates the feed, distracting from genuine discoveries.
Now that I’m thinking along these lines, it would be nice if a warning comment came up when you submit the first ID of a species in a country/state-equivalent on a verifiable observation, similar to the warning when you submit a rare bird in eBird. I can imagine it would might be too expensive to run these filters on every ID submission though.
This is the first identification of [Reticulated Giraffe] in [Canada]. Please review and confirm that you want to make this identification.