Add UI for filtering by project on Life List

[pisum]

@kildor

general this is impossible to do.

seems to me like it should be generally possible. unless the API has a limit, it should be theoretically possible to get a list of included taxa from the project rules.

one of the main complications, as you noted would be if you have an umbrella project where the subprojects are inconsistently defined. another complication is if a project has both include an exclude taxon lists. the combination of include and exclude across many subprojects would be the most complex case to handle, i think.

@kildor

If, for example, project includes “Plants”, or “Aves”, or “Odonata”, how unobserved taxa should be calculate? All subtaxons? Only exact taxa?

i think either way should be possible. you would just have to decide how you want to compare (and in which direction). exact taxon comparison should be straightforward. subtaxon comparison should be possible by getting ancestor taxa. it’s a little more complicated, but it should be doable.

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@maxo

In the case of projects I am referring to “Included Taxa” which are listed on the project edit page. So for a project with say 10 taxa, but only 5 of which have observations

it’s interesting to me that people are setting up massive taxon lists in collection projects, especially since i assume most people are doing this manually (since i doubt most people would know how to do this through the API). seems like it would be a lot of effort to do something like that manually.

there has been a request before to allow collection project taxon lists to be defined via a taxon list: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/filter-collection-project-using-taxon-list/6470. some discussions in that thread seem to sort of be asking for functionality that may be similar to what you’re asking for here.

i think that would be the most straightforward way to implement a comprehensive solution to the problem, although even that kind of solution probably wouldn’t handle the complicated cases where you have umbrella projects with many subprojects with varying lists, nor where a project has both include and exclude lists. that probably would only ever happen via third party willing to code a tool for that. (i don’t think it would be super hard to do, but i probably wouldn’t do it myself since it seems like it would have a very limited use case. i might be more interested in making something to sync up project rules with a given list though – assuming there is an API endpoint to get taxa from lists – or to copy project rules from one project to another project.)