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…