How can I find my Needs ID Observations that have Identifications from others?

A high volume Identifier has left (I think) because suddenly my species count dropped significantly. I think this means that the only species level Identfications on some of my Observations were from this individual and now are lost.

I think I would like to go in to my Observations and add comments to my own “Needs ID” Identifications, noting any initial further Identifications made by others,. Then if anyone else were to leave, I could then look at my comment, see what someone else had previously noted as an Identification, and utilize the Leaderboards to look up who else I might want to request look at a reverted Observation.

To be clear: I would not be adding an Identification to a more specific level, only adding a comment like, "identified as “Genus/Species” to my existing Identification.

I can easily generate the data for which of my Observations are Needs IDs, and note that many only have my own upload Identifications but are already at species because I have learned a lot from those here (so very grateful, thank you).

My question, for @pisum for anyone who may know, is, is there a way to show which of my Observations that are Needs ID have Identifications made by others?

it’s possible to get this data, but i can’t think of a way to get a filtered list of such observations without some coding.

i’m not sure exactly how you plan to use such infomation, but it is possible to get a list of your needs ID observations, showing an identification count (anything >1 should be identified by others in most cases, since it looks like you almost always add an identification), and maybe that is enough for your purposes: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations?user_id=itsmelucy&quality_grade=needs_id&per_page=200&options=idextra&idextra_user_id=itsmelucy.

or maybe if you just want to find differences between your id and the observation id, you could also use a variant of the standard CSV export as a starting point. see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/export-a-project-w-my-identifications-not-the-consensus/42195/5.

if it’s not enough, then if you could describe a little more clearly why you want to get this information, i could probably guide you on how to modify a Jupyter notebook i made back in the day to get the information you’re looking for.

I just want to add in the comments I detailed in my post.

That way even if the Identifier later deleted their own profile (and their Identifications with it), I would retain the information about what it once was identified as within my own Identification, as you are correct that I always add my own Identification to each Observation I make.

With that in mind, the first link works quite well, thank you @pisum! Is there any way to sort by “ID Count @ Obs”?

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i wouldn’t want to add that sort of functionality on that particular page because the API itself doesn’t handle it. it’s possible, of course to sort things, but it would require someone doing some custom coding for that.

the way i would probably handle that is to periodically download my own observations using my Jupyter notebook, including the identifications made on each observation. if i knew that a particular prolific identifier deleted their account, then i would be able to search for that particular account among the IDs and go back and add comments / IDs, as needed.

i think if i were to proactively go and add a bunch of comments, that might create a bunch of notifications for others who had interacted with those observations, which might be annoying.

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I think if I just edit my existing Identfications to add a comment (without changing the Identification), it shouldn’t send any notification.

(I am also hopeful that there are not that many that I do not recognize myself, since many I upload at Species or Genus myself.)

I am not even sure who left, is the thing. I just saw my Species count plummet. So I would not even know which Observations to update.

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ok. that should work probably.

if you notice that there’s a change soon enough, sometimes you might be able to use GBIF to get an idea of what the previous ID was (since you license your observations in a way that allows them to flow to GBIF). in this case, i think it’s too late to do this easily though: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=itsmelucy&place=any&quality_grade=needs_id&outlink_source=GBIF.

it’s also possible to get similar information from a copy of the AWS Open Dataset metadata, although that would take a little bit of effort to do.

the results of my Jupyter notebook do include identifications count. so you could get those results and sort (or filter), if the effort to figure out how to do that would be less than the effort to just visually scan through the other page.

There’s clearly a need for something like an “observation history”, or making it easier to maintain IDs of deleted accounts, so that laborious methods like this would not be needed. As has been pointed out elsewhere on the forum, a botanist who has annotated museum labels with species doesn’t have any sort of ownership over those IDs, and can’t take them with them if they decide not to work in botany any more. Something similar could be implemented here with an observation history, that would record all IDs added, or at least changes in the observation ID, without having to say who added them.

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