As an avid user of inat I’m always looking for something new out in nature whether that be a plant, bird, insect, fungi, or whatever else there’s always something to see. That said the longer you use inat in one region the harder it seems to become to see something new. However if you look at our life lists versus our home regions this just isn’t the case! There is a link you can use to see all the things you haven’t seen. Below is the list of species I’m currently missing for my home state. Only just on Friday did I knock Song Sparrows off that list. What common species are you still missing? Which do you really hope to see this year? Personally I’m trying to get as many of the species seen over 100 times in Colorado as I can.
All you need to do to see yours is change the name “blazeclaw” in the url to your inat username and then do whatever search parameters you normally would on the inat map. For example if you’re from California just search it on the map and see what you have yet too find (a lot I’d imagine so many species over there!)
This is a great idea! I have a short list of birds my grandma has seen but I haven’t, but I didn’t realise which plants, fungi and insects I have around me that I haven’t observed. I’m seaching two much smaller areas than you, but I’m astonished there’s a total of 38 Wood Anenome observations in my patch and none of them were me!
At the start of this year, I found the 100 most commonly observed species in Ontario that I hadn’t found yet, and made a list out of them. So far I’ve seen 12/100 (I haven’t uploaded my ring-necked duck photos yet). It’s been really helpful as a guideline for what I should be looking for, or where I should be looking for new things.
I’ve got a long list of critters I’ve ever never seen (pipits, pine warblers, rio grande chirping frogs, timber rattlers, pigmy rattlers), or seen elsewhere but not here, or have seen but never photographed (racers, coyotes, barred owls, barn owls, wilson’s snipe…)
There’s always something :) I lived in the panhandle for 15 years and still never saw everything there was to see (for instance, prairie kingsnakes, too many birds to list, round tailed horned lizards).
If I were to do my home county, I have to find 175 species with the most common one being 6 obs. Not surprising since I have 84% of all county obs so I expected the list to be short. If I search for species at the state level and only look for species with more than 100 obs, the list would be 361.
Though my current goals for the year are, seeing if 20th, 76th, 156th time is charm on certain species like White-headed Woodpeckers, Greater Sage-Grouse, Northern Goshawks or Harris’s Sparrows. Outside of birds, I hope to find plenty of more insect species and all the Treasure Valley desert specialty reptiles.
This is really helpful for pointing out my blind spots. There are species that I see all the time that I’ve apparently never stopped to observe. Now I will. Many thanks, @blazeclaw
One question though: Is there an efficient way to output a list of the resulting species? I could export the data of the results, choosing which fields I want, then use something like R to make an ordered list of the most common species. I could copy the list of species by hand, or take a screen shot of the top results. Is there any quick way to take the species from the species view as a text list, without the pictures, frames, etc? Thank you.
What list ? The list of species you have not seen? The master checklist against which it is compared? Pretty much all pages have an export/download tool. It is most often on the modal popup that comes up when you press the filters button.
you can go to “filters”, and then “more filters” on the explore page, and type in the place. the place ID should show in the URL, and you don’t have to leave the page ;)
Alas, as a new user in one of NYC’s boroughs*, I have an awful lot of organisms I haven’t yet seen.
Here’s how a newbie made the conversion: First, I simply clicked on @blazeclaw’s link–which, of course, gave me the wrong data. Next, I substituted my username at the end of the URL, which still left me blazeclaw’s location. (Place ID number? Never heard of it.) Lastly, I clicked the X next to the location and substitute my own via the search box. And within a matter of minutes I both learned I have a Place ID and what it is.
And… Wow! Over 2,700 species I haven’t seen or uploaded yet!
Explainer for non-New Yorkers: each borough is also a county, so NYC is composed of five counties.
The export/download tool, as far as I can tell, always outputs one observation per row. I want the list that is the topic of this discussion, one species I haven’t observed per row. As I said,
Unless I’m misunderstanding, your answer only restates something I stated in my question.
I don’t believe there is any functionality in the UI to export a unique species list other than in checklists where there is an export and taxonomic export function available. That is kind of pointless in this case as to build such a checklist you would already need the unique list.
Perhaps it could be done through the API but I am unsure if the needed endpoints exist. If there is a way through the UI I don’t know it, and no one else has stepped up to suggest it, but perhaps they will.
If I manually select the text with my mouse, dragging it starting from the beginning of the first name to the end of the last name I want on my list, I get a list with rows formatted like this:
So each species is given 5 lines, and I only really care about the 4th/5th line. Pasting that into Excel puts each line in a different row. Since it’s a consistent pattern I’m thinking there should be some way to automatically remove the rows you don’t want?
Actually, it isn’t a perfect pattern because some species don’t have a native/introduced status and then that line is skipped.