I wold like to convert it to a collection project to not need to add every observation manually.
However I want to exclude all “non-wild” observations (to not get pets: dogs, cats, cows etc.). This is currently not an option to only put “wild” observations into the project. The only thing I can do at the moment is to “exclude” every species that is a typical domestic species, it would however be more useful to simply exclude every non-wild observation.
if you are talking about things specifically marked as ‘wild’, you might not want to do that. Since wild is the default unless marked otherwise, people generally leave the field blank.
One way to do it is to remove the “Must be wild” rule from your current project and, once you have converted to a collection project, allow only Verifiable and Research Grade observations. A verifiable observation has a date, location, media evidence, and is not marked captive/cultivated. So this would remove anything marked as captive/cultivated from the project and prevent anything marked captive/cultivated from being added to it. It would also, however, prevent any casual grade observation from being included in the project.
I suspect this may intentionally be an old style project as it states it is submitting data to a government agency, which likely means they want any obscured locations.
@cmcheatle yes so far it is intentionally a “old style” project, mainly because we wanted to also include “casual” observations. We rarely have any obscured locations however.
@charlie I was talking about thinks that are by default “wild”, not observations that are marked as wild. With the normal search function one can choose “wild” or “captive”, the first excluding everything that is “cultivated/captive”.
As a group we wanted to have a tool to record observations without images (some species are obvious ti ID in the region - hogshead, squirrel etc. - but hard to photograph).
@deboas@tiwane I however want to include any observation (also casual, because having no image) into the project. I only wanted to exclude anything that is “captive/cultivated”.
I guess the project will stay an “old style” project for now. Maybe in the future collection projects will allow more refined searches.
I’m also experiencing the same issue. I manage a small project that is focused on documenting the wildlife in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The National Aquarium is within the project boundaries so I’d like to exclude the captive observations people make of the animals in the building. I’d imagine nature centers or similar facilities might also have this problem. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/waterfront-park-at-the-national-aquarium
I already switched over to a new collection project without realizing that I wouldn’t be able to make a rule to exclude “captive/cultivated.” I also do not want to exclude the casual observations because we are often making observations with students who are doing citizen science for the first time and don’t always get a photo of the birds before they fly away. I’ll just use the search tool workaround for now.
Update. I found a different solution. Looking more closely at the observations made of species within the aquarium, it was only a small handful of users that uploaded them. I set up an exclusion rule for those specific usernames (after making sure they hadn’t made observation of wild animals as well) which removed the captive fish I wanted to exclude from the project. Not sure if that’s the case in your project for the domestic cats and dogs but may be worth looking into. Hope that helps.
Hey, thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I do not think this is a good solution for me excluding specific users. But I may look into it and see if it is maybe possible to exclude certain species (cats and dogs).
It would still be great to have the possibility to explicitly exclude “non wild” observations rather than simply excluding “casual” observations (which also include some types of observation that I want to have in the project).
Hi Tony, any news concerning this point, ie are the concrete plans to include such a filter? Setting such a rule is possible for traditional but not the new projects. I for one would appreciate to see this option.
This feature is also of great interest for me. I am in charge of a project called “Plants in metropilitan france”. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/flore-de-france-metropolitaine
More and more cultivated plants are declared in the database ( from gardens to balconies…) and this doesn’t correspond to the idea I have for this project
Is there any chnace that the “must be wild” entry be added to the selection criteria inf collection projects?
Your project currently only includes observations with a data quality of Needs ID and Research Grade, so once an observation is marked as non-wild it becomes “casual” and will no longer appear in your project. Do you also want to include observations of wild organisms that, say, lack photos or dates? Then you’d need to a “must be wild” toggle.
We tried gaming out a design for this some time ago (probably around the time this request was created) but I think we got hung up on the user-interface part of it and how it would affect and be affected by other requirements chosen for the project (eg quality grade). Thinking about it a bit more today, though, I’m not sure it needs to be that complicated. I could imagine an “Exclude captive/cultivated” option either being grayed out unless “Casual” is selected, or maybe only appearing if “Casual” is selected, because that’s only when it would be needed. The best long term solution would be to separate wild/not wild from casual but that’s a much bigger issue.
This would help me out with plant collection projects too. I am collecting records that are in the wild and some species that are also planted a lot in gardens have observations that show up too.
