Grouping past observations into new project

[MFeaver]

Florida Natural Areas Inventory is not getting all the observations on obscured posts. A change in what was entered when we joined that project enables obscured locations to be available to them. I made that change. However, it did not apply retroactively to prior posts. How can one group all of my observations for a given species on FNAI’s list to be manually entered into the project? It’s too labor intensive for me to post each individually.

[pisum]

please clarify a few things:

• is the project that you’re interested in this one (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/fnai-tracked-species-collection)? that one seems to be a “collection” project. so i wouldn’t expect that observations would need to be “manually entered into the project”. if you’re saying that some observations are not automatically being included in the project, can you provide some examples of such observations?
• or when you say that “it did not apply retroactively to prior posts”, are you saying that project curators have no problem seeing obscured coordinates for your new posts but not for your older posts? have they tried looking at your observations again recently (sometimes it takes a little time for changes to flow through the system)? can you provide examples of observations that are ok and ones that are not ok?

[MFeaver]

1. There was a general request that those who were posting FNAI listed species check their account settings when we joined the project in order that FNAI could acquire that information, particularly if we had indicated “obscure” under location. I corrected my setting for that project last week.

2. I checked observations posted before the change which were on the FNAI list and these were not included under projects with FNAI. On a species which I had a few observations, I manually entered FNAI under projects. On species of which I have many observations, this would be too daunting a task. My question was whether there was a faster way to getting that into the project then opening each observation and entering FNAI manually.
   I may have been too impatient.

3. There is another issue, which I raised with the agency. I have observations from many places, domestic and foreign. While scrolling a list of an FNAI species to add that project, I inadvertently included an observation seen in another state. It occurred to me that if all observations no matter where seen were sent to FNAI they would be overcome with extraneous information since this is a Florida listing. I suggested to them them they may want to restrict it only to Florida observations and reject any observations not seen in Florida.

4. I also found that on observations which had not been verified and posted before I changed the FNAI settings, when I tried to include FNAI under projects it was rejected. I did sent an e-mail to FNAI to note the observation numbers and suggested, if they wished to have a record of these observations, if there was someone on the staff who felt comfortable that these were the species, they might wish to confirm it so it could be entered into the FNAI project. These observations (except one which had private, which I changed to obscure), had “obscure” on location.

This did not seem to occur when I posted a new observation. Those observations accepted FNAI as a project with the initial post.

[pisum]

ok. i searched through the projects again, and in addition to the “collection” project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/fnai-tracked-species-collection, there’s a “traditional” project https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/fnai-tracked-species.

it looks like you are a member of the “traditional” project, and i suppose then you would be trying to add your observations to that traditional project.

but it should be possible for the curators of the “collection” project to set it up to allow members to make their obscured locations available to the curators.

so could it be that the curators need you to join the collection project and allow them to access your obscured locations via that collection project? (going with this approach, you shouldn’t have to manually add observations to the project. it should just include them if they meet the project requirements.)

[MFeaver]

Thank you. I’ll check with them.

[pisum]

ok. great.

if it turns out you still need to add observations to the “traditional” project, this is probably the fastest way to accomplish this for many observations at once:

#1

go to the edit observations screen. (in the website, look for your profile icon in the top-right corner of the page, hover over it, and select “Edit Observations” from the dropdown menu.

#2

on the Edit Observations screen, open up the search menu, and use the filter options to narrow down the observations you’re interested in. (for example, in the screenshot below, i’ve filtered for taxon=flies.)

#3

once you’ve narrowed down the observations you’re interested in, click on the Batch Edit button.

#4

at this point, you’ll see checkboxes to the left to the observations. select the observations you want to add to a project (or you can use the Select All option at the top of the page). when you have everything selected, select Add to Project, and pick your desired project. (note that although the list may include “collection” and “umbrella” projects, too, you can manually add observations only to “traditional” projects.)

…

note that you can use the same process to remove observations from projects. (click Remove instead of Add in the last step.) you can also adjust the process slightly to batch edit your observations in other ways. (in the last step, select Edit Selected instead of Add to Project.)

EDIT:
oh… i didn’t realize it until now, but there’s already a tutorial that covers most of what i wrote in this post, plus a few more tips: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/adding-observations-to-a-traditional-project-wiki/13190.

[MFeaver]

This is what I was hoping to find! Many, many hours (or if not done, a guilty conscience) saved. Thanks.