Display of the number of species manipulated?

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Platform Website

window 11

Firefox

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=felix_riegel&view=observers

Why are fewer and fewer species displayed at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=felix_riegel&view=observers even though I enter new species almost every day?

New species were e.g. Psoralea plauta, Drosera zeyheri, Oldenburgia paradoxa, Evippomma squamulatum, Rhoophilus loewi, Hedybius marshalli, Aspalathus pedunculata, Stapelia rufa, Acokanthera oppositifolia, Mesembryanthemum granulicaule, Lythrum hyssopifolia, ā€¦

on January 24th, 2025 14,460
on January 25th, 2025 14,444
on January 30th, 2025 14,405

How can the number of species be manipulated?

i didinā€™t look at the details of your case, but it sounds like https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/total-number-of-inat-species-is-decreasing/31811

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Hi Felix, Iā€™ve had the same thing happen to me at least twice nowā€“I ā€˜lostā€™ something like 500 species this most recent time, and adding species seemed to be the factor that drove that decrease in overall species. I thinkā€“and I could be wrongā€“that it only affected my number on the public leaderboard though, as my count under ā€œmy observationsā€ continued to increase, at least to the best of my recollection. Iā€™ve spoken with at least one other iNatter who was experiencing a similar issue about it, and it doesnā€™t seem like thereā€™s an easy fix. A friend and I have been chatting about it, and our tentative guess is that it has something to do with non-species taxa being submitted and how that factors into the algorithm used to produce that number, but it sounds like your recent additions have all been at the species level?

Two thousand sp added to CV
https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/105731

Perhaps that explains some of the difference?

I donā€™t think adding species to the CV model would affect any ā€œspecies observedā€ counts. These species exist in iNatā€™s taxonomy and as identifications on observations irrespective of whether they can be recognized by CV.

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Note that in this report tiwane stated in Dec 2023 that the solution would very likely need to be re-applied in about 12 months time! Seems about right to me.

2 Likes

Hello cypselurus, I have now added, among other things, 7 new species and some new families and ā€œlostā€ another 12 species. Adding species seemed to be the factor that caused this drop in the total number of species. In my case too, it is only my number of species on the public leaderboard; my number under profile has continued to rise to 15,730 observed species. All species were entered in the habitats-s-afr project (4,495 species on January 31, 2025). I will now enter data without a project and see what effect that has - otherwise I am at a loss as to how this happens.
on January 31, 2025 14,393

Best of luck! My observations go into two groups by default, so Iā€™d be curious to see if your excluding them from a group would have an effect.

Unfortunately no luck! My observations are getting fewer and fewer
one day South Africa 11 new -32 species (without project)
one 2 days France 19 new -19 species
if it continues like this 30 new -47 species I need about 9165 new ones to get to 0

This is due to the fact that Elasticsearch, which is what we use for searches, will give approximate results for some complicated searches, which the counts for the Observers tab can suffer from. See also https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/number-of-species-greater-than-number-of-observation/59789

FWIW I see this today:

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