How to exclude observations already added to a project from a new search

General
#1

Hi there, I would like to be able to search for observations that are not yet added to a specific project. For example, I have already added many observations of parental care in giant water bugs to the Parental Care project. I will likely come across additional observations in future searches using different key words, but those future searches will likely include observations that I’ve already added and I will waste a lot of time clicking on the observation to see whether it has been added or not already.

I did find the following on the forum:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-exclude-user-specified-taxa-in-a-search/6691/2

and thought I could modify the URL syntax to exclude observations in Parental Care by adding this:
&without_project_id=86512

for example:
https://inaturalist.ca/observations?place_id=any&q=egg&subview=grid&taxon_id=47793&without_project_id=86512

but, alas, it didn’t exclude any of the already added observations.

Any help/advice would be much appreciated.

Kevin

#2

You can use the not_in_project parameter, e.g. https://inaturalist.ca/observations?place_id=any&q=egg&subview=grid&taxon_id=47793&not_in_project=86512

#3

Also on the main page of the project there’s a button to find fitting observations, it already has this parameter and excludes observations from the project.

#4

Many thanks for the tip, this is exactly what I needed!

#5

Thanks for the reply, do you mean the link “Find suitable observations”? I don’t think this will work as when I click on this it just gives me a list of 60+ million observations. I think this has to do with the project being set up as a traditional project and not one that automatically gathers observations that fit particular criteria.

#6

Yes, this one, link uses settings of your project so you may need to add them.

#7

I haven’t added any criteria to automatically gather observations because for this group the only way to confidently add observations of parental care is to examine the photos carefully and read any field notes. For instance, few people add “parental care” or similar tags to their observations, so we have to be creative in how we search for observations, but this sometimes yields a lot of false positives. For example, a simple search for a taxon combined with the search term “egg” turns up observations of parents with eggs, but also includes eggs on their own, or observations from places with “Egg” in the name, or observations where people have included a life history synopsis in the field notes, or observations where small parasitic mites have been mistaken for eggs, etc. and if these were all added automatically we would be spending all our time deleting incorrect observations from the project. Does this make sense?

#8

Sure, but it seems you need observations of animals only, so you can add it as a taxon and plants and fungi and everything else will be excluded from the search automatically.