Find range-restricted/endemic taxa

[dcoopercem]

Is there a way of searching for taxa observed ‘only’ in a particular area (and nowhere else)?

[jdmore]

See this topic:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/finding-endemic-species-that-have-been-observed-on-inat/11911

The only way right now is to get into the checklist for the place of interest, and filter for endemic taxa. Here are some further examples (click to see the filter settings):

Nevada endemic taxa observed on iNaturalist

All Nevada endemic taxa (observed or not)

Of course, these all depend on accurate and thorough community curation of the checklist for that place. This happens to be one that I have curated.

[dcoopercem]

Thanks @jdmore. I did see that earlier thread, but this is more looking at range-restriction whether they’re recognized as endemic or not (I’d assumed that the endemic label was assigned a priori to each taxon, rather than generated by the location of reports).

There doesn’t seem to be a clear way of filtering in the checklist unless someone happened to click “Establishment Means: Endemic” for that particular Place/Species combination (which sort of defeats the purpose here - trying to use reports to deduce a pattern rather than going entry by entry).

In other words, how would you generate a list of species that may be rare but widespread, yet ONLY recorded (on iNat) in Nevada?

[pisum]

i don’t totally understand your question, but getting stuff from the API via /v1/observations/species_counts will return a list of taxa, along with 2 observation counts – one based on the filter criteria you specify and another based on all observations in iNaturalist.

you can see this in this screenshot of results from https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts.html?place_id=50 :

that page gets data from /v1/observations/species_count for top observed species (leaf taxa) in Nevada (place_id=50). you can see Neotamias palmeri (Palmer’s chipmunk) was observed 92 times in Nevada and 92 times in total, which means that it was only ever recorded in Nevada (in iNaturalist).

[dcoopercem]

@pisum yes, that’s basically what I was asking.

Looks like the API is the way to do this, rather than, say, using GBIF or trying to use projects/checklists.

I appreciate the response!