How do I search which families I have/have not observed?

General
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1

I would like to find out which vascular plant families I have not observed in my province. I’d like a solution that either updates dynamically or can be checked efficiently, so I don’t need to regularly navigate to the taxon pages for all ~180 families and click “View Yours” on each one.

I’ve tried a couple different strategies and haven’t found one that works:

  • Using an Explore filter with unobserved_by_user_id= and setting the low rank to Family doesn’t work because it only shows families with observations unidentified at family level. Families with e.g. a single distinctive species won’t appear there.

  • Before the life list updates in late 2020 I could have made a list with all the families and then it would show which ones I have observations of and which ones I don’t. That functionality no longer exists.

  • I can create a list with all the families and then use the list “Compare with” feature to compare it with my life list, navigating to the plant pages. However I seem to be getting a bug here which makes that ineffective. Even if this worked properly it would be pretty inefficient since I’d have to click through pages of all the species I have seen.

  • If this feature was added and it worked in lists and on all taxon ranks then that would work.

Am I missing anything else that might work, or is this just not doable currently?

2

you can export your dynamic life list, and just pull out the family-level taxa to make a list. am i missing something?

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Nope, I didn’t think of that, thank you! I was hoping for something that would update by itself but it’s not too bad to re-export the list or add new families when I observe them, only takes a few seconds. I also forgot there’s the download CSV button below normal lists which covers the place side.

The 2020 list update blog says they were hoping to add dynamic place checklists within the next few months, but looking around the place page I don’t see it. Am I missing something there too or has it just not happened?

4

the thing that drives the dynamic life list technically can handle dynamic place lists, too, but i think they probably tested it and realized that many places contain tons more taxa than most personal life lists and that routine use of dynamic place lists using this mechanism could put a significant load on the system. so they probably intentionally decided not to create a user interface for the masses for places.

if you want to use the underlying thing, you can. i made a page that gets data from it, or you can get stuff from it directly via an undocumented API endpoint. here’s my page showing plant taxa from verifiable observations in Ontario, excluding those from your Ontario plant families list: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_taxonomy?taxon_id=47126&not_in_list_id=4540223&place_id=6883&verifiable=true.

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Huh interesting, that makes sense. Thanks!

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