I couldn’t find a feature request that dealt with this but this has been bothering me during recent identifications. When putting in a genus with multiple sections and subsections, section seems to be the taxonomic rank listed first, and are searched off of their parent genus. When imputing a genus like Hypericum, Oenothera, or Euphorbia the autofill seems to be full of section level groupings, and its not until I have written the entire genus name that the genus moves to the top. It’s not a huge deal, but I have miss-clicked on section a number of times mistaking it for the genus I was intending to ID the observation to.
I don’t fully understand what rank is displayed first, but it seems like it ranks them somehow in a way that is not fully clear and I’m not sure if there’s some quirk to how section is displayed or if it is an intentional functionality. I personally prefer the display order from the main search bar, which seems to rank things from largest unit to smallest, but I can see some IDers not loving that method. Maybe the best answer is to not search sections and subsections off their parent genus.
Not quite the exact case, but a similar issue that really irks me.
If I start typing ‘koala’ into the ID box and reach ‘koal’, the top option is somehow ‘koalas’ (the family, which is monotypic anyway) rather than ‘koala’
The order here makes no sense to me either. Logically if the order of the suggestions was dictated by something, it should be alphabetical? Obviously that’s not the case, so what is the factor here dictating the order?
Similarly, if I type the full word ‘koala’, the species still doesn’t appear as the top option, but indeed the genus is the top one:
Nonsensical behaviour again, because the genus doesn’t even have ‘koala’ associated as a common name for English (only in Polish??)
I’d love for that other issue to be sorted too, but I think this is a bit different? My case is related to when I actually start typing manually vs. using the AI suggestions based on the photo
sorry to be blunt: can “sections” be abandoned altogether? They are completely useless. Kind of a taxonomic excursion, which isn’t needed at all for faunistic work. Since they bear the name of a species, it creates more confusion than help! I would be perfectly happy to stay with “genus”, “subgenus”, “complex” and “species” …
It occurs to me that there’s a related feature that might partially address this one: format subdivisions of genera as “Genus section Section”. I don’t know what effect, if any, this would have on the order of entries in the list, but I think it would make it a lot more visually obvious whether a given entry is a genus or a section.
If you think particular section-rank taxa are not serving a useful purpose in iNaturalist, you can flag those taxa for curation and start a community discussion (in the flag) around possibly sinking them into the next higher-ranked taxon.
Sections in general, though, are valid taxa that may be very useful in other groups of organisms, so I doubt the site would eliminate them altogether.
EDIT: I should have said valid botanical taxa - understood that they are not formally recognized for animals.
That would have really helped me out a lot with an observation I recently had some trouble with. I was trying to put an initial ID for a leguminous shrub, picked a section that suggested relatedness to the species I thought it was likely to be. Turns out it was a section in a Proteaceous genus.
