Maybe add a better visualization for the life list function? I’m a visual person, and I’d like to be able to look at the tree of life that I’ve completed, right now, the “life list” is a bit… lacking. (not hating, I love INat.!)
A ‘tree’ would be amazing! It would be best if we had both options, though.
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Agreed - more visual options on that would be really cool! Possibly with increased share-ability and perhaps more of a checklist/achievement style, if that makes sense. (I’m competitive, I guess.)
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I know there is a tab on the life list where you can have your species in taxonomic order. But I do agree there needs to be an update to the life list feature. My life list has stopped updating its self, so none of my newly observed species are not on there (I also cannot manually add them). tear
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Yes! this is all pretty much exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe something you can zoom in and out on, where the different branches of the tree that you have observed are lit up, so you can see how much you’ve seen.
I knew about the taxonomic view and that’s what I was saying was lacking just a bit. It could be something like this, except interactive:
That’s super unfortunate… Did you try clicking the boxes to the right to allow all taxa? A lot of mine aren’t observed or whatever.
Or maybe this:
source: https://www.evogeneao.com/explore/tree-of-life-explorer - this one is interactive and “complete”, pretty cool
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You can do something sorta like this for your yearly stats. It’s not a tree of life, since it only shows the taxa that you’ve seen, rather than all known taxa:
https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2018/you
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@oviscanadensis this might help you…
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/species-doesnt-show-up-on-life-list/1401/9
Super cool! Didn’t realize this was a feature! I dig it.
I think it would be good to have somewhere on your page like your year in review which shows everything you’ve put on iNaturalist rather than in just one year. This would both allow you to see a tree of what you have seen, but also any of the other stats that normally show up on your year in review page.
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When I first joined iNaturalist, the Life List was my favorite part of it, but as time has gone on, it has become very archaic and I agree that it is in serious need of an upgrade. The tree-of-life idea sounds really cool, but I would even be down for something similar to the “Your Observations” display on the Explore page, but with the option to list species by taxonomy instead of by the number of observations each species has.
It would be a pretty simple solution too.
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It does not have the tree of life view, but the better way than the checklist that I have found to track my life list and stats around it etc is to create a collection project of my own sightings.
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/cmcheatle-s-research-grade-species-life-list
I’ve specifically chosen to make mine Research Grade records only, so some would say it is not a complete life list, but that is my defintion of my life list, and certainly not required.
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I love seeing my “year in review” stats; would love if they could incorporate cumulative iNat observations into a similar report.
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i wonder if this feature request is still relevant now that the new life list screen is available? it provides a better taxonomic tree view of your observations than the old life list screen. so maybe that’s sufficient in terms of better visualization?
among the visualizations discussed so far in this thread, i think the sunburst chart (from the year in review pages), along with related icicle charts, are probably the best way to visualize this data, since they provide an indicator of the number of observations in each taxon.
i don’t think the tree of life views are really possible since the iNaturalist taxonomy specifies only parent-child relationships, not anything more detailed in terms of branching age. you can do radial trees without branching age information, but then you lose the observation count dimension provided by the sunburst chart.
the new life list page comes along with a new API endpoint that provides data that can be used to make a sunburst or icicle chart. i’ve been tinkering with that a bit. (nothing too fancy. just wanted to see the general structure.) for example:
- https://observablehq.com/@robin-song/inaturalist-observations-by-taxon?us&chart_type=sunburst&user_id=bouteloua
- https://observablehq.com/@robin-song/inaturalist-observations-by-taxon?us&chart_type=icicle&user_id=tmandalios
these are sort of cluttered in general, and although they have a certain aesthetic beauty to them, i’m not sure they actually help to visualize data that much better than simpler parent-child pie charts, an iconic taxon pie chart, or the new life list’s new taxonomic tree view…
one last note: i noticed that the sunburst chart in the year in review pages is actually a little incorrect, i think. it’s not counting observations that are at taxa higher than species in cases where those taxa are not the “leaves”. so the counts of taxa that are harder to identify to species (like fungi and flies) seem to be undercounted in general… but that’s another issue…
I agree this request is no longer relevant as it refers to a feature that no longer exists so I’m going to close it.