compare button, additional selection optiions

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: web version of iNaturalist

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: n/a

Description of need:

when trying to identify tropical moths, the “compare” list often yields too many species. Try “Noctuoidea” combined with “Malaysia”, for example. The common species are listed first, which makes a lot of sense in most cases. However, looking for the rare species, these would have very low observation numbers. In consequence, they may be cut off.

Feature request details:
What would help:

  • to have an “inverse sort order” button, only for large lists with a cut-off, to start from species with 1 observation towards the more frequently observed ones, cutting off the common species at the end.
  • alternatively, a cut-off could be used to remove species with, say, >200 observations worldwide. (or the species actually covered by the AI identification system) The list would then show only the rare species which are unlikely to be suggested by AI.
  • to have buttons “on my life list” and “not on my life list” to select taxa I remember or taxa I have never met
2

Inverse sort would help. ‘This is the most observed sp’ is useful to nobody.

I use Visually Similar and then look at the map – is it Nearby, is it possible ??

3

as a possible alternative:

  • implement the option to exclude taxa pretty much like in the “explore” searches
4

I found a way to solve my problem. Not very elegant, but seems to work. (1) Create a list with the common species which you don’t need and (2) exclude species of that list in the search URL.

Example:

search the most common moths in a given area (SE Asia)

copy and paste into a new list. It now contains the 1000 most often observed moths

https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/4600937-most-common-SE-Asian-moths

to get taxa further down the list (past cut-off), to get Noctuoidea, use

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&nelat=2.2311324219601048&nelng=157.19561509497686&not_in_list_id=4600937&subview=map&swlat=-12.091599342578638&swlng=94.13409165747687&taxon_id=47607&verifiable=any&view=species&without_taxon_id=47224

in this example, there are still another 1000 Noctuoidea taxa missed. To get those, I probably would need my list to contain many more, but I haven’t done that so far