On the page for Coos County, New Hampshire, I marked the common watersnake as “doubtful” because I was not aware of any records of this species in northern New Hampshire. When I checked back, I noticed that this species was removed from the page.
I noticed that the range map highlighted southeastern Coos County as the northernmost range of N. sipedon in NH. Although I couldn’t find any records of N. sipedon from Coos County, I didn’t intend to completely remove this taxon from the page due to the possibility of its presence in the southeastern region.
I would probably mark N. sipedon as “unknown” rather than “doubtful” since its presence in Coos County is a possibility.
How are taxon added to a place when there are no observations from that place?
Species on a place page are controlled by the Checklist for that place.
On the checklist page you can add a species and edit its Occurrence Status and Establishment Means
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I love the Forum because I’m constantly learning new things about how other people use iNaturalist. If I understand your question, you are choosing the “place” tab and then searching for Coos County NH and it shows a gallery of all the species found there. Cool! I didn’t even know you could do that. But I believe it is only a list of the species observed on iNaturalist, not a checklist of all the potential species, which I don’t think would be possible – what would be the information source for that? Am I missing something?
Aha, so that’s how it works! Nice, thanks.
For this species, you could do a search for specimen records in the ARCTOS or VertNet online databases to supplement the iNat records. I did a quick check on VertNet — no sipedon recorded in Coos.
The shaded range maps you see on iNat are not always very accurate for some species but in this case the shaded map looks pretty good.
None of this means that this snake might not be lurking there awaiting discovery.
There seems to be a record of N. sipedon from Jefferson between 1939 and 1997 on the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department website distribution map, and this species is still common throughout much of New Hampshire, so I will probably mark N. sipedon as “unknown” in Coos County.
You can also use the “About” link when using the search box at the top of the page:
In Nevada, the curator of the Reno Herbarium created checklists of all plants collected in each county. We uploaded those lists to the county checklists using the “Add Batch” tool. Now, if you are using the Compare tool, you can select the checklist to see all of the species of that taxon that are known from that county.
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