How do I monitor atlases?

Curators
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I’m a new curator, and part of my motivation to request curator rights was to create atlases for some of the plant species for which I’m trying to improve iNat IDs.

I’ve updated a couple of existing atlases based on literature, herbarium records, iNat RG observations, etc. and I’ve added an atlas for a taxon that didn’t have one.

But I’m lost as to how to find an efficient way to monitor these atlases moving forward. The Atlases guide page presents atlases as a tool for monitoring observations that fall outside the expected range: “A yellow warning at the top of an atlas indicates that there are observations that fall outside of the atlas presence places. Clicking “view” will display the culprits on the observations search page.”

But other than opening up each atlas page on a regular basis I can’t see how I’m going to be aware of these errant observations. It doesn’t seem efficient for me to trawl through the 1200+ atlases flagged at https://www.inaturalist.org/atlases/ page by page, looking for taxa that I have enough knowledge to assess.

I guess I was hoping for an ability either to search for atlas pages within some part of the hierarchy and return a list of results with an indication of which atlases have out-of-range observations, or alternatively to be able to “favorite” specific atlases and see them as a list.

Am I missing something?

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You are not missing anything, the only option is to perhaps bookmark in your browser ones you want to monitor. There are no site tools for any kind of monitoring or notifications etc.

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There’s a request for atlas notifications in the notifications post, and I just put in a feature request for a better search/filter on the atlas page as well.

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Thanks for the quick replies. Good to know that I didn’t overlook something. I upvoted your feature request, @jwidness.

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I was looking at understanding Out Of Range this AM after reading a similar wiki post. I wanted to see if I had any observations that matched.

In the API page, I found a reference to out_of_range = True/False. However when I tested it, it dd not do anything.

Is there a URL approach to finding Out_of_Range observations?

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I believe it is actually deprecated but the documentation is outdated. I seem to recall asking a similar question back in the Google groups days and getting that answer. But the site should confirm it has not changed since then.

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@mikeq - I am pretty sure something is broken in the actual API call. The data is still present in observation records that are returned.

For example, if you look at the json for this record of mine, it has the out_of_range=true flag set in the data, but no amount of tinkering with the call parameters is getting them back.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/16722570
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/16722570.json

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I added a very basic search to atlases in response to Jane’s feature request https://www.inaturalist.org/atlases. So now if you wanted to see all ‘marked’, ‘active’ atlases of taxa in the LIliaceae you’d do https://www.inaturalist.org/atlases?utf8=✓&filters[taxon_name]=Lilies&filters[taxon_id]=47328&filters[is_active]=True&filters[is_marked]=True

The out-of-range is vestigal, we don’t display it anywhere anymore (except the old filter menu thats still on https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/loarie). It worked directly on the taxon-range, rather than using atlases

5 Likes
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Thanks @loarie. Just saw this. It’s a helpful addition to be able to monitor and address out-of-atlas observations.