Display higher level taxon in Suggestions tab on Identify to match computer vision dropdown

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

This is not exactly a bug, but I don’t understand why I get very different suggestions when working on identifications in two different ways and one is far more helpful than the other.

I often go through unknown observations on the website by clicking on the “identify” tab and picking a place and unknown. I then click on an observation and quickly move through for most only choosing a higher level taxa (plant, fungus, etc).

When using this view, the default settings are “observations” which gets all sorts of wildly incorrect suggestions. (First suggestion - change default settings so I get the same suggestions as when I click on an individual observation)

My point of frustration is that there is no way (that I can see) to get suggestions of a higher taxa than the species level ID. For example, many times the best suggestions are coming from the same family of plants and that I would feel very confident in identifying to that level.

However, if I were to click on a single observation directly and then go to identify it, I often get a suggested genus or family (such as below).

Having the higher taxa suggestions easily available in the suggestion tab when in the “identify” view would help me quickly do much better than a simple ID of “plant” and then allow the experts to quickly find and improve them.

Just noting that iNat already does this in some views and not others, so it’s a feature that already exists.

I would adore having this as an option. There’s so many fungi where realistically computer vision just isn’t going to be able to get them past genus, or maybe subgenus/section, at best. Just having the option pop up instead of having to type in long section names like ‘cyanoxanthinae’ would be so lovely.

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Please consider this feature request (add comments and vote for it):
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/identify-page-observation-page-dropdown-list-of-upper-taxonomic-levels/12319

@bouteloua Please consider merging these feature requests.

Thanks a lot.
And happy new year!

It looks like this one is referring to the “Suggestions” tab whereas yours is referring to the “Info” tab (and would also make sense for individual observations pages), so I think it’s OK to keep them separate feature requests here.

Yes, this is about the suggestions tab. Right now the default suggestions selections get you ridiculous things - maybe the most commonly observed species in that place? (but not having any resemblance)

I know that there are many people like me who work on putting simple top level categories, but may also have enough knowledge in certain categories to get more specific (ex. to family rather than phylum) which would be helpful. I don’t always have the names at the tip of my tongue so it would be helpful to have this info readily available.

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This is something I’ve been wanting as well.

Might also help to prevent some Ancestor Disagreements

Made a github issue here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/3996 Will need some design work and some other decisions need to be made as well before it can be coded.

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