Very cool, thank you for sharing!
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.
2 Likes
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
4 Likes
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.
2 Likes
Thank you for this lovely gift!
2 Likes
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.
1 Like
I had actually tried to do this by hand for myself. Great to know iNat will do it for me.
3 Likes
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 ;)
2 Likes
This is wonderful!
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.
2 Likes
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:
N
924 observations
©
Yellow-bellied Marmot
Marmota flaviventris
N
853 observations
CC
Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel
Callospermophilus lateralis
N
743 observations
CC
Moose
Alces alces
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.
This is brilliant! I limited mine to birds, and it’s telling me I don’t have Tufted Duck in my home city, which is ridiculous. Maybe the quarantine will lift by winter and I can get out and fix that.
1 Like
Thank you @upupa-epops . I tried copy/paste into a plain text document, and from there into Word. I then used the Replace function in Word to find “^pCC^p” and replace it with “^p” where ^p is how Word searches for paragraph breaks. A few more similar Find/Replace, and I had just the Common and Latin names, separated by commas, in a two and a half page document. It is an inelegant solution, but took only about 3 minutes, and is compact enough.
1 Like
Please note this only works for 500 species. The view is limited to the 500 most observed species that you have not seen. If you want a complete list and your result is over 500, you will not get those.
1 Like
Wow using this link I found out that I had never added an observation of the squirrels that I have seen almost everyday of my life. So I went out and fixed that today! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/42271925
7 Likes
I think it is important to mention to everyone that this function will not show a species you’ve observed before but not in a particular location. For example lets say you’ve seen a Song Sparrow in Washington but not in Oregon, and you restrict your search to what you haven’t seen in Oregon, then the song sparrow will not be on that list.
4 Likes
See https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/find-species-unobserved-by-me-in-a-specific-place/11497/5 for a working albeit clunky way to do just that.
2 Likes