I searched around for Bug Reports or prior discussion, but couldn’t find anything matching these conditions.
I created a member-based Collection Project, New York Master Naturalists, to collect Observations by - you guessed it! - NY Master Naturalists. The sole criterion is Project Members Only; the User, a NY Master Naturalist or Trainee, has joined the Project. Any place, date, time, data quality, nothing else is filtered.
The problem I’m seeing is that the Observers tab counts are missing a lot of the user’s actual Species. For example, I have at this moment 18,659 Observations and 2,124 Species1. On the Project’s Observers tab, the Observations count matches, but only shows 1,796 Species, a gap of 328 Species.
If it was a caching issue, I would expect the Observations count to also be off. Also, although I’ve been adding Observations this week, I did not just add 328 new-to-me species!
It’s not just me. The same thing is happening for everyone else on the Observers list that I’ve checked.
Unless I’m missing something simple, I can write this up as a Bug report, instead.
Yours in Nature,
Xris
For some reason, iNat is imposing a “Verifiable=True” limit when I click that link, even though it’s NOT present in the URL.
Thank you. I remember having read it before. But then I wasn’t trying to compare User v. Project Observer counts.
I tried the suggestion.
When I set High=Species on my own Observations, I reproduce the Species count of 1,797 I’m seeing in the Project.
But then the Observations count is wrong: 13,408.
Many of my Observations don’t get identified to Species. I have many Subgenus or Complex Observations, mostly for Genera that can’t typically be identified to Species just from photographs.
If I instead set Low=Complex, the level immediately above Species, I get yet another count: 695, more than double the 333 (2,124-1,797) I would expect to see.
I don’t know why there’s an extra 362 (695-333) “Species” getting counted for not-quite-Species.
To summarize, there are (at least) three problems that give rise to inconsistent results and user (me) confusion:
Collection projects are not just “saved searches” because they don’t count things the same way as a search.
Collection projects are internally inconsistent because they use two different rules for counting Observations and Species.
Across iNaturalist, “Species” is used in at least three different ways, counting different things depending on the context and active settings.
Probably there are a number of observations ID’d to species complex/subgenus/genus where you also have at least one observation of a species within that taxon – these would only be counted once in the total count of leaf taxa, but when you separately calculate distinct species-level IDs and distinct IDs above species level, these taxa get counted twice.
If you filter for just your observations within the project without any rank limitation in Explore, the numbers on the tabs on the top menu bar will show 18,659 observations and 2,124 species, so the project is including all your observations.
Collection projects are indeed just saved searches; it is the Explore page that is inconsistent about how it counts and displays things. You should get the same results – including different species counts on the “species” and the “observers” tab – if you click on the link on your dashboard to view your observations in Explore.
I think this is because the other ~5k observations “count” toward how much you’ve contributed to the project, but they aren’t ID’d to the species level, so they don’t contribute anything to your species total.
My understanding is that this means 333 of your “ID’d above species” taxa represent taxa for which you have no observations of any species within those higher taxa. The remaining 362 (695-333) are taxa under which you have observed something at the species level. So either way you do a species count (species-level IDs or “branch ends” on the taxonomic tree), those 362 will be obscured by the species-level IDs under them.