Ever wonder what you haven't seen in your area before? Here you go!

General
21

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
22

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.

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23

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.

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24

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
25

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
26

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
27

Ah, perhaps wording it “species in an area that you have never observed anywhere”.

I filtered to my city and in the top 20 species were 2 birds, 1 moth and the rest all sea creatures and I’m never going to go diving so never going to get those.I then changed to my local government area and obviously got a more manageable list. A few things in there I wouldn’t mind seeing and some I have seen but not recorded on iNat.

1 Like
28

Thank you @blazeclaw. Is there a method to save this search for future use?
Now that you have set me up for the challenge, I’d like to check back in a few months to see how my life list is improving in comparison to what is around me. Thank you again for this info.

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29

I save it as a favorites button on my toolbar

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30

I think if you use the data setting “before x” it will compare data for that period.

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31

Thank you, @blazeclaw! Although you may have unleashed an obsession with playing with data and maps…

Getting my unseen species following your instructions got me into doing other kinds of searches of species near me. For example, I have a tab (pretty much open all the time) of Research Grade observations in my borough of NYC, so when something unusual is uploaded I see it. And for the City Nature Challenge I zeroed in on observations close to me to discover that a park I’ve been frequenting had no observations! So I took a walk there this afternoon to add some.

2 Likes
32

Is there a way to have a list like this with species that have no or few records on iNat but are naturally present in the area? Because Czech Republic (whole central Europe though) has much less observations on here than USA I think and there are a lot of blank spaces. So the species are there but there are not enough iNaters to capture them.

3 Likes
33

You can use the checklist tool on the site, at least to find ones with no observations. There is a filter there for species with no records. It does depend on the checklist being well built up by someone. It is relatively east to import stuff to a checklist assuming a reliable source is available.

Here is the Czech Republic list of species with no records https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/8893-Czech-Republic-Check-List?q=&view=photo&taxon=&observed=f&threatened=any&establishment_means=any&occurrence_status=not_absent&rank=species&taxonomic_status=active&commit=Filter

3 Likes
34

Thank you, I’ve been looking for this.
So the species in the mission page on android app are taken from that list or from near observations?

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35

I think, but someone else should verify this that that uses your GPS to get your location and then generates a list base on submitted nearby things, hopefully with some kind of priority of things seen more frequently. I believe that tool is to help you increase your list, not get new things entirely for the site.

I rarely use it, but looking at it on my device, it is clearly things with records of observations already.

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36

I’m not using it regularly, but sometimes I look if the new thing I found isn’t there. There is usually just 1 observation of that species near. Clearly not many observers are at my location, so I suspect many species would not show there although they could be quite common.

  • if the app shows species from the nearest observations, it would be useful to be able to open the checklist in the app (if that’s possible than I just haven’t found out how).
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37

It looks like nobody has mentioned this looks particularly useful if you click filters, and filter it to the current month (like anything ever seen in June, not just the current June). (Then view the species tab.)

2 Likes
38

Yes, but I misunderstood how that works. I wanted a list of things other people had seen in June which I had not seen ever, but what it spits out is things I personally haven’t observed in June whether or not I’ve seen them any other month. For example I have 9 observations of Malacothrix saxatilis (five of them research grade) and yet it still pops up on the generated list of things not seen as soon as I add the June filter.

1 Like
39

Thanks, that explains why it said I hadn’t seen pink lady’s slippers. I think that’s probably worth calling a bug.

40

No, it works as intended, if you choose any date range it will compare data from it only.