Platforms : Website
Description of need : When there are many species under a genus that have not been added to the database, species can now only be added one by one, and they have the same Parent ID and Source(sometimes), which leads to duplicate and meaningless operations.
Feature request details : I suggest extending the Scientific Name window https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/new As shown in the picture
This allows curators to add species of the same genus in bulk
Would also be nice to have auto taxon frameworking and the option to include a URL in the taxon creation page (POWO for vascular plants, for example), with maybe a checkbox stating âthis taxon matches framework source for Phylum Tracheophyta sourced to Plants of the World Online.â
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As a workaround, Iâve noticed that after adding the first species you can use the browserâs Back navigation to return to a (mostly) pre-filled version of the New Taxon page. IIRC, when I had several species to add in the same genus all I needed to to was enter the new scientific name and reselect the correct reference source. The parent name and rank were already there. I canât remember if I had to repaste my comment text explaining why I was adding the species.
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This will certainly save us a lot of time. Also sometimes there are many genera we need to add under a same family, when we add taxa from often-overlooked groups.
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If this is possible it would be great for us curators, but I need usually more time for adding synonym names and for filling in the Taxon Framework Relationships than for creating the taxa itself.
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I donât add too many taxa to iNat so I havenât encountered the issues discussed here, but one thing we try to do is match the iNat taxonomic database with taxa that people are observing. Having a lot of empty nodes requires more support, infrastructure-wise. So Iâd be concerned that making it easy to add a lot of species at once would create a lot of unused taxa in the database. But perhaps that outweighs the tedium of adding lots of needed taxa to iNat.
Iâm absolutely voting for this feature after looking into a bunch of unresolved flags where users request addition of some taxa, usually just one or two species (perhaps noticed as missing when they want to tag observations).
I took a look into a few unfamiliar taxa (usually arthropods) where i felt i could adequately fix requests (at least just the one or few species requested) then unexpectedly faced with lineages where whole swathes of species are absent.
Such a feature would certainly speed up getting those fixed, and greatly reduce tedium for those doing it. It should also mean reduction in a number of flags of âplease add this taxaâ and users perhaps getting frustrated by some being absent.
I see the point that adding many âempty nodesâ would add to system infrastructure, but on other hand iâd suggest those will typically be ones that will largely remain empty (obscure taxa, difficult to record/identify etc), so do those âempty nodesâ really add much undue load?
More broadly, i suggest having such âempty nodesâ would give users a truer reflection of the known biodiversity, i.e. not misleading them to just one or a couple of easily identified taxa within a lineage, but actually (arguably often with non-vertebrates) when the focal lineage in reality has many scientifically described species (while only a couple seem to have nominated observation). This way shows the actual current complexity. Equally for the âbetter/truer reflection on biodiversityâ that also feeds into having more accurate summaries of the âBig Dataâ such as the fraction of described species with observation data. Currently itâs the fraction of valid taxa with their names added, notably those with alleged observations of them; but how much described biodiversity is actually missing?
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But for some, there is a note. All species added (then many in that list with no obs, yet)
So there isnât a consistent rule.