Can collection projects display Genus-level observations?
I follow https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/nps-lake-mead-national-recreation-area and https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/invasive-species-citizen-science-at-lake-mead-national-recreation-area and try to report all of my observations of introduced Tamarix. Many Tamarix species can only be identified by genetic analysis or microscopic examination of flower parts, and many species readily hybridize. Expert identifiers and many observers are recommending observations only be made to Genus level, and many species-level observations are being raised to Genus. Both of the above projects have “All taxa” criteria, but Genus-level observations are not displayed on the initial view. If I contact the project admin, what change should I ask them to make in order to display Genus-level observations in the project for species that are only identified to Genus?
They’re there, they just don’t display easily unless you set a filter. If you view all observations and display by species, iNat won’t show things identified to genus if things in that genus have also been identified to species. To see what hasn’t been given a species ID, go to view all observations, then click the filter button and set “low” to genus. Now just things identified to genus should show. I got 85 Tamarix records when I tried that.
That’s the problem. A researcher or invasive plant management crew would just query the iNat database directly and not bother visiting the park project pages. But the typical park visitor who visits the project page would never see the most-observed introduced plant in the park without configuring a Genus-level filter. That is not likely.
So my question is - can the project be configured to display Genus Tamarix in the unfiltered view?
Hmmm… that’s tricky. I don’t know of an easy way to do that, though someone else may.
You can save links to searches, so as a workaround, maybe, a project admin could do something like add a link to the search results for Tamarix either in the “About” script of the project or in a journal post about the Tamarix situation, which would make it easy to find.
I’m not clear what it is you are asking for here. As @m_whitson said above, the genus level observations are recorded by the projects. They are also displayed in the Observations tab on the project pages, but you will have to scroll down a ways to find one. If you click on “search” on the Observations tab for the NPS – Lake Mead National Recreation Area project, and search for genus Tamarix, you will (at this time) see 224 observations, of which 85 are ID’d only to genus.
The only place I can see where they are not displayed is in the “Species” tab which lists species in order by number of observations. If this is your concern, then the project admin’s can do nothing about it – that is the way the Species tab is implemented in iNaturalist. There is an existing Feature Request to modify this behavior: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/sort-the-species-tab-by-higher-level-taxa/3043/10
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