I have just tried to set up a list on iNaturalist, of all of the species listed in a guide that I have - Which Native Tree by Andrew Crowe, for NZ trees. Creating this list of all of the species was relatively straightforward.
I cannot figure out how to see what species I have not seen from my own life list, without exporting all of my observations and making my own comparisons using a script. But I’d like to do this on the platform.
Has anyone else tried to make a list of things to see, and then struck this issue? What am I missing?
however, since the introduction of dynamic life lists, the non-dynamic list does not authomatically update with taxa that you have observed. so if you want to compare your list with your non-dynamic life list, you need to copy the taxa from your dynamic life list into your non-dynamic life list first.
as far as i know, there is no system function that compares lists with your dynamic life list. it probably wouldn’t be super difficult for a third party to create something that would compare a list with a dynamic life list, but because there’s no telling whether people want an inner-join-type, full-outer-joim-type or left-outer-join-type of comparison, because there’s no telling which list should be the “left” list, and because there are many different types of taxon lists folks might want to compare (list, dynamic life list, top species list, collection project include taxon list, etc.), the scope of the work could easily expand, and it might take more thought and work to make something that would be generalizable like that.
The compare function did not work the way I expected, at all - it only used a very old static life list (which I can’t remember making), and it wasn’t clear how to just check it against my current life list.
I think the left list could be either list - it has “show only this list” or “Show only the other list” or “show both” as an option at the moment in the compare function.
You can make such comparison using experimental observations compare tool https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/compare.
The first query must be specified as list_id=4494359, e.g all observations for taxons in list
The second query is user_id=richardlitt&list_id=4494359, e.g. your observations for these taxons
this might work in this particular case, but just keep in mind that that comparison tool would work only in cases where the taxa in each set have observations in the system and are represented as “leaf taxa” in the top species results. also, the tool might not work well if you have more than 500 taxa in either set.
in this case, you’re reducing the life list set to fewer than 500 taxa by limiting it to only those taxa which are also seen in the custom list. this effectively limits your possible comparison options to only a left-outer-join-type comparison where the “left” list is the custom list.
I think the limiting taxa is an issue - I have too many observations. The last link that you present, @pisum, almost works - but I’m looking for Research Grade observations, not just any observation.
I think this would be really useful if it could be a feature of iNat, because it would allow people to find species listed in their guides or for set locations.
then you have to use either the method i described initially, or you could also use asdan’s method, in each case just setting your life list set based on research grade observations only.
if you use my method, these could help you get the set of taxa that you would need to load to your non-dynamic life list, depending on whether you want all taxa or just leaf taxa:
One thing that strikes me is that none of these solutions is really easy. I think it would be excellent if other people could share lists from guides, or from other locations (thinking especially of nature centers working with kids), and then providing an easy way for users to compare against those lists without doing any extra work. I think that would really help iNaturalist’s goals.
well, someone has to do some work. so i guess it’s a question of who should do that work.
from my outsider perspective, there are some fundamental issues with the way taxon lists are / can be defined in the system, but changng that could be a relatively heavy lift. so in my mind, there’s no sense in iNat staff developers creating a very robust way to make comparisons between all the different existing kinds of taxon lists easy because, in an ideal world, the way all these kinds of lists are structured would undergo a heavy overhaul first.
so then, in the meantime, a third-party developer could do the work, as i explained in my first post, and folks have already created different things that make various kinds of comparisons, but as far as i know, no one has made a single thing that handles every possible kind of comparison, and i doubt that there’s incentive for anyone to do that sort of generalized development because no one has a personal need to do all those different kinds of comparison.
and on the other hand, none of these solutions strikes me as particularly hard either. so, again, who should take the burden of the work?
There’s another possibility besides changing the heavy lifting of changing all of the kinds of lists – make it so that your life list is dynamic, and that you can show this sort of comparison with simpler UX in the UI.
I still think it would be great if Nature Centers could share a list of species, and then have a way to check if all of the kids get them all on iNaturalist - or something similar. I’m not thinking about the tool here so much as the use-case that serves the purpose that the tool was build for.
you do have a dynamic life list now, but it’s incompatible with the static lists. your currently static life list used to be updated dynamically, but the way that updating worked doesn’t scale well, which is why those old life lists are no longer updated dynamically and why the dynamic life list exists now.
you could make a feature request to cretae a function that pushes the taxa from your dynamic life list to a static list (to replce the work of exporting the dynamic life list taxa and then uploading those to your static list). however, your dynamic life list currently includes observations that are not research grade. so if you wanted to do your comparison with a life list based on research grade observations, then that’s something else you would have to add to your request.
it’s all these little user preferences like this that make things complicated and which deviate from more simple workflows that could be achieved already in the system. remember that if you didn’t care about research grade, then my other suggestion would work well enough for you:
I had a similar idea of generating a list of species I haven’t seen for a particular area for trip planning purposes. I found the Explore page very useful for this exercise, similar to what pisum posted. Using the Explore page I can generate a list of all the species in an area, and with a qualifier I can also list species I haven’t seen in an area. So in your case you could generate a list of trees reported in inat and display all of them or just the ones you haven’t seen.
