explore / compare: possibiity to subtract species from "home"

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s), web version of iNat

URLs n/a

Description of need:
When ID’ing moths from another country, I often use the “compare” button or “explore” with a geographical area + a month to get an idea of the common representatives. Because there are often so many species on offer, particularly with Noctuoidea or Geometridae it often hits the 500 cut-off, it would be helpful to be able to subtract the species I know very well. These are mostly the species I have “at home”.

Feature request details:
My wish: To be able to define “my home” region in terms of a geographical entity. Then (1) to have a toggle within the “explore” and “species” result page, to switch “my home” species on and off. This should basically remove all species which occur at “my home”. And/or (2) the same toggle within the “compare” list. Of course this can be limited to 500, but should get me beyond, because now a number of species have been removed.

Example: I would set “my home” region to Germany, and then I could search, say Noctuoidea of Spain and see only species which I do not know from my “home” region. That would be excellent! Thanks for considering it.

p.s. not sure if I should have added it to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ideas-for-a-revamped-explore-observations-search-page

2

this seems like a fairly niche request as described above.

generally, you’re trying to compare two lists of species, i think. so creating or extending a tool to do a comparison of two sets of taxa seems like the more generalized solution for this kind of functionality.

there already is the “experimental” compare tool (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/compare) that allows comparisons of multiple sets of data, although it’s not designed to work in cases where any of the sets has more than 500 taxa. so i think the most elegant solution to your problem would be to extend this tool or create a similar one that is not limited to 500 taxa in each set.

otherwise, there are various 3rd party tools that allow you to get the taxa from various observation queries. so you could put those sets of taxa into, say, a spreadsheet and compare them.