Any chance we could get an icon and map marker color for prokaryotes? Right now it’s still a question mark/gray/unknown…
Yes, and one for Bacteria, and one for Viruses. Thanks.
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Anyone have suggestions for colors?
Looks like the only colors not already spoken for are orange, yellow, and black. Yellow would probably have some visibility issues. Maybe also a darker blue (than vertebrates), or a lighter pink (than Fungi).
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There are lots of intermediate or mixed colors, not all of which have common names, but any of which might work as long as the color shade is not easily confused with another major taxon.
Whatever works is fine with me. Even various shades of brown, purple-ish brown, Yellowish-brown, beige and so on. Various grays would also be OK, silvery grey, yellowish grey, lilac-grey…
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I agree. It is confusing to have both unknown and grafted taxa labeled as gray. Yellow would probably have visibility issues as @jdmore mentioned, but I like the idea of a lilac.
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This would also make it much easier to go through Unknowns. Right now I avoid older Unknowns because the chances of its being something in these categories skyrockets as you go back in time.
I can recognize a few of the more known/charismatic groups like Stentors or Tardigrades but it mostly feels like a waste of time for me to look over those observations.
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Linking the affiliated bug report for future reference:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/non-iconic-taxa-appear-under-unidentified-unknown-observations/702/3
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Several iconic taxa already share a colour. (All the vertebrates are the same blue, all the inverts are the same orange). Why not make bacteria, archaea, and viruses share the same purple that the protozoans have?
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I also decided to mess around in gimp to see if I could see what colours are ‘leftover’. The blacked out areas are what’s already covered by existing iconic taxon colours. It would seem that we’ve still got a lot of space left in the yellow-green-blue area, as well as a dark turquoise option or maybe something between blue and purple. The reddish colours seem to be mostly taken, though.
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Have you tried adding &identified=false to your search string? That should return only observations with no IDs.
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Maybe they don’t want to exclude ones identified as “Life”?
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The chart does not really include grays and browns, and other similar, highly mixed colors.
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That’s true. When trying to represent a spectrum, I guess it’s hard to show colours that don’t actually exist as individual wavelengths of light.
That would be nice, it’s not close to the colours in use already, and not visibility problems!
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It appears several taxa still fall into the unknown category. See below for research grade observations in the US that are unknown - even a beetle! Quite a few - 156 species.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=1&quality_grade=research&iconic_taxa=unknown
The beetle should be flagged, it’s shown correctly on taxon page, but curators should be able to do something to move it out of unknown.
Until all iconic taxa are reassessed (and probably redesigned), we won’t be adding new iconic taxa.
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I’d like to add a +1 to this request, even if ALL algae/prokaryotes were in a category, I really think it adds value to separate them from true “unknowns”. When I filter by unknown my goal is to help people who have had no movement and no hint at what their observation may be, but instead I end up sorting through “bacterial crown gall” and “Nostoc” often when that was not my filtering goal.
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