Create a marine project taxa

General
1

I want to create a project where only marine species are included. Instead of adding every taxa is it possible to add a taxonomic dictionary such as the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)?

Thanks
Caitlin :)

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2

What is your definition of marine?

Oceanic or anything in or on water?

Inat does not really have a functionality to link to a dictionary like you suggest but depending on your answer to the above there may be an alternate way

3

It would be great if habitat was a basic component of every observation. If not as important as date and location, at least up there with wild/vs cultivated. Then you could easily group your invertebrates, /mammals plants etc between land, marine, freshwater, forest savanna etc. The regular contributors of the Southern African observations add all obs to the ‘Habitat (sAfr)’ project to achieve this.

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4

Ah great. By marine i mean species that live in the sea or coastal species. So seaweeds, fish, marine worms ect

Cheers

5

Yes i agree, its proving difficult to make a marine project on it as i will get lots of terrestrial observations in the project if its open

6

Then what you can do, I will do up a sample URL or search that excludes the continents and what is left must be in the ocean. It would not have worked if you wanted the Great Lakes since they fall into North America.

In the project rules under the places section of the exclusion filters, just enter North America, Europe etc

7

Please note that the approach above is not a perfect solution, it has a couple of potential issues:

  • the defined maps for the continents should be very close to mirroring the coastline, but can’t be guaranteed to be perfect.
  • you have to deal with the facts that for example if someone submits a penguin on the beach in South Africa, it does not count, but if it is swimming 200 meters offshore it will
  • there are specific issues about what areas something counts as when the accuracy circle goes onto the land.

But the only other option is to manually configure the list of species you want which will be incredibly time consuming.

While putting habitat into every observation seems like a pancea, experience shows it is just not viable. Observation fields have spread like wildfire leading to inconsistency in their use, it may be possible for a dedicated group to monitor and even fill in the details for a relatively small geography, doing so for every record that comes into the site is not viable.

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