Change order of species in search results

General
1

I’m new to iNaturalist so apologies in advance if this is a stupid question. If I search for say ‘All Birds’ in a specific location and then click on ‘Species’, the order appears randomly. It is not even in alphabetic order or taxonomic order and there appears no way of sorting the results. If I want to add a species to help people wondering about species in a particular geographical area I have to carefully scroll through all the species to see what’s there. I’m hoping this is a setting I’m simply missing or maybe, I’m just being stupid. Any help greatly appreciated.

Many thanks
Gavin

2

Hi! Welcome to the Forum :)

No worries about “silly questions”, it’s OK.

Which webpage are you on? If you can include a screenshot as well that would help.

3

By the way, if you’re into silly questions, we have a lot of those.

4

if you’re talking about either the species tab on the Explore page (ex. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=94453&subview=grid&taxon_id=3&view=species) or the species tab on the Place page (ex. https://www.inaturalist.org/places/houston-arboretum-nature-center#taxon=3), i believe the sort order there is based on number of observations. i’m not aware of a way to apply an alternative sort order to either of those pages within the system, but you could use the API (https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/#!/Observations/get_observations_species_counts) to get the list of species, and then sort those results yourself. (here’s an example of something that may or may not simplify the process of getting stuff from that API endpoint: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts.html?place_id=94453&taxon_id=3 .)

there’s also the concept of place checklists (ex. https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/284087-Houston-Arboretum---Nature-Center-Check-List?q=&view=photo&taxon=&iconic_taxon=3&observed=any&threatened=any&establishment_means=any&occurrence_status=not_absent&rank=species&taxonomic_status=active&commit=Filter), and you could download a “taxonomic csv” from that, but lists are a little different from what’s displayed in those other pages. so you could also get lists of species from checklists, but use at your own risk, i guess…

5

Thanks for getting back to me.

Here’s an example with a link and a screenshot.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=11192&taxon_id=3&view=species

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6

Thanks very much for your response. That is helpful. I do think that a simple sort by common name, or taxonomic order would be useful there. Maybe I’ll suggest that in the features section.

Thanks again
Gavin

7

There is a thread collecting suggestions for Explore and better sorting has already been requested, for example here and here.

Have you tried using the taxa view? For example https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/taxa?place_id=11192&taxon_id=3. It’s nested taxonomically and has an easy CSV download if you want alphabetical.

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8

That’s great! Many Thanks.