Description of need: Describe the iNaturalist community need that your requested feature addresses. Include screenshots, URLs, and other details to help us all understand the issue.
I am a bit of a completionist: I would like to observe all the species in a genus, for example. I can see how many unobserved species I have in a genus, family, or order using the dynamic life list along with the “Unobserved Species” button. This works well but is a bit cumbersome. If these unoboserved species were in the list or tree view, I would be able to get this information at a glance.
Feature request details: In detail, describe the feature you are requesting. This includes its functionality, where the feature is implemented, and what it might look like. Screenshots or mock-ups are helpful. The idea is to have a concrete and actionable request which the community can discuss and vote on. It might change through discussion, but it’s much easier to iterate and talk about something specific.
I would like the dynamic life list tree and list view to contain both observed and unobserved life forms. You can also add a filter buttons radio button for observed and unobserved species. Clicking on the filter would toggle between the view that I am requesting, and the current view which only shows observed species.
The unobserved species/orders/families in the list should appear grey in color similar to the scientific names already in the view, and should contain no green number bubble, indicating that there are no observations there.
Do you just mean the unobserved species in an observed genus? Because I doubt if a tree view of all unobserved taxa on iNaturalist would be of any use to anyone? Family and especially order could already get unwieldy, if you can imagine a tree of, for example, every unobserved species of Asterales. I think your proposal needs more explanation.
I agree. A mockup might help here. But just having a list and tree view with all of iNat’s taxa on them seems very unwieldy/not very useful. It might be a big load on iNat as well if a lot of people are accessing the lifelist?
I’m not against such a feature, but it is pretty easy to do this already, so I probably won’t vote for it.
Currently, you can just look at the taxonomy view on the taxon page and compare that to your life list. While it is a few extra steps, it’s still very easy and quick.
Also, iNat Next already has a sort of personal checklist feature that lets you see which of the species observed nearby you have observed as well.
I think a slightly more advanced equivalent of that for the website would be nice, but if it is supposed to be thorough and work even in areas without many active users, it would require every species to come with an atlas, which will take quite a lot of work.
now that the dynamic life list exists, it should be possible to create a browser extension that uses the data from the underlying API route (GET /v1/observations/taxonomy) to modify / decorate the taxonomy tree with information about whether or not you’ve seen the any given taxon and maybe also how many observations you have for each taxon.
@sessilefielder authored an existing extension that, among other things, can modify the top of the taxon page to tell you how many observations you have for that taxon. so i think it would make sense to add this sort of requested functionality to that existing extension.
not directly related, but i created something a while back that will parse that life list data a little bit to make it a little more friendly for making things like sunburst charts and that sort of thing…
EDIT: oh, and i forgot to mention that you could theoretically use /v1/observations/taxonomy to create life lists for, say, projects and places instead of users, or you could add other filter criteria that are not available in the standard dynamic life list interface (as long as the set of taxa that you return isn’t too massive).
I don’t know about seeing grey branches for taxa I haven’t observed yet. That would be very cluttered unless it telescoped in like some apple photos or maps. I would like to organize my observations taxonomically at some level. I recently wanted to show a friend the birds I had observed so far. I was having a heck of a time filtering out insects and taxa that were not interesting to her. The ability to organize observations would be helpful for introducing interest in nature to city raised folk.
(in this case Lissachatina fulica is the “unobserved target species”)
(*also ignore the fact that the Bradybaena similaris entry doesn’t have binoculars after its number)
That’s pretty close to what I want. But it’s still pretty challenging to pick out observed from nonobserved. I see the numbers on the right, but my eyes are drawn to the left, at the common name. I think something needs to be there to indicate observation status, and that’s why I had recommended changing the color of the entry.
Though, I will say that this is very close to what I am looking for!
