Platform(s): website
URLs: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa
Description of need: To my knowledge, there is no page that has the list of kingdoms. This would be useful for identifiers who are looking to move observations out of the “Life” bucket, in order to check the list to make sure there isn’t more than one kingdom that they think an observation could be.
Feature request details:
To follow the framework of how every other taxonomic rank is, I propose to embed that list somewhere on the “Taxa Info” page, which is what is linked to when one clicks the “Life/State of Matter Life” link of a user’s identification. The Taxa Info page is not extraneously long, so I don’t see any negative impact to the aesthetic of the page, and could be listed below iconic taxa as an “Explore Kingdoms” section or something like that. It might also be more educational than simply having a mix of iconic taxa, that are a combination of Kingdom, Phylum, and Class.
An alternative would be to have a taxon page for life. Is my memory fuzzy, or did there used to be a page for Life? It seems that the link for life on the website goes to a specific taxon page ( https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/48460 ) and then redirects to https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa .
It’s technically possible to get to the taxon page for Life, but there’s an intentional redirect that’s been in place since almost the beginning of iNat.
Link to relevant github issue: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/3571
As an aside, I’m pretty sure the redirect is one of the reasons I made https://jwidness.github.io/iNat_expandable_taxa.html
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Thanks for the info! I was going to link your page but wasn’t sure if it was appropriate. It seems crazy that a third-party tool is the best way to access this information when it is so easy to do so for any other taxonomic rank.
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OH MY HEAD!
I have been looking for something like this for years! I wanted a chart of life so badly, in high school I made a massive excel file of all living things going all the way to sub-order. At the time, i used Wikipedia due to it’s linked taxon tree, but as you can imagine, it didn’t take long to run into discontinuities. I love that iNat has to focus on pragmatism and efficiency in it’s arrangement of the tree of life, it might not be considered as evolutionarily precise, but it’s plenty good enough for me.
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I thought I had looked over feature requests pretty well before sending mine in, but I just sent in a similar (but not identical) feature request. I think mine is different enough it will be posted separately, but just in case it isn’t… I’ll also make a shorter version of it as a comment supporting this feature request…
Mine is about including the Domains Eukarya and Prokarya, at least, above the Kingdoms and below State of Matter Life & to make them full taxa pages & viewable in the taxonomy hierarchies on each taxonomy tab on taxa pages
Even though we have a sort of “workaround” here for this State of Matter Life page request, that doesn’t help the next newer learner who is unlikely to unearth it.
Is there some practical reason to not implement both this suggestion (about the State of Matter Life page) and also implement my request about adding Domain pages visible and functioning like any other higher taxa page on the site?
It seems pretty straightforward but I suppose might not be.
