I would love to be able to use the app to search my own observations by family, and get a list of all the taxa I’ve observed within a particular family. Especially with plants, this would be immensely important. I sought help with this issue and was given a rather convoluted way to search my own observations by family under the “explore” option, but since the app is already so slow and takes a long time to search through observations, this does not help me.
What would it take to be able to search one’s own observations by family? Often times I can not remember the name of an obscure genus I’ve only seen once but I can remember what family it was in. I type the family name in the search box and am only given a list of unidentified members of that family I’ve photographed. It is quite frustrating. This would be a huge step up in functionality. Also, is it possible to download a simple text PDF of all identified taxa I’ve seen? If not this would be a huge step up too.
Hi @joeysantore, I revised the title of your request to more directly state the feature your are looking for. Feel free to edit further if I missed the mark.
I approved the request for posting because I don’t know enough about the phone apps to say whether this can already be done there or not. I only use the apps (rarely) to make new observations.
On the web site, however, it looks like you can use your Life List to get the information you are looking for. For example, this returns all the taxa of Phrymaceae you have observed:
You can plug in any Family (or any other taxon you want to list) in the search box. You can also switch between this plain list, and a taxonomic view. At the bottom of the list, there is a link to export the list to CSV or Taxonomic CSV, which you could then manipulate in a spreadsheet to generate PDF output. The site does not support direct output to PDF, other than from the web browser.
Again, don’t know if or how much of this same functionality is available in the apps, but hopefully others who do will chime in.
As it currently stands, searching one’s own observations via the app (which is the most practical venue to use in the field) does not allow one to come up with a list of all the species in a particular family by typing in the family name.
This would be especially helpful when one is trying to remember the name of a multi-syllable, rare monotypic genus that was observed a year or two back but can only remember the family such a plant was in.
