Is there any way to get a listing of species which have only one observation in a specific area (state, county, etc.)? Specifically, I’d like to find any of my observations which are the only one. No, I’m not looking for bragging rights. I just occasionally find that one of mine is, and it gives me a happy feeling like I’d made a contribution to the record of the species. Plus, encouragement to keep observing and to look for other potential observations which just haven’t been ID’d to species. (Also makes me a little concerned about the species’ welfare, but trying to focus on the positive.)
If anyone knows how to pull out that info & is willing to share, I’d appreciate it.
@elias105 Made a tool a while back to check your “rarest species”: https://elias.pschernig.com/wildflower/leastobserved.html
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Thank you so much for responding and sharing!
I opened your link, filled in my username, used the filter field to select Ohio, and hit Update. The screen refreshed and displayed the following:
"loading observations for Whateverwatcher
8 cached items of 1003942 bytes found
111% (8/8)
https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/species_counts?user_id=Whateverwatcher &place_id=31"
That’s it. I wondered if I needed to copy the link & open it in my browser, so I did. That produced an extremely long string of some kind of programming language. Do I need some specific software on my device to render this properly?
I think you may need to do it once first without the Ohio filter, then apply a filter after it has calculated your overall data.
I tried with the user ID you provided, and I got the same error; but when I tried without “Ohio”, it calculated normally, and after that I was able to re-add the Ohio filter and it seems to return the Ohio results. Looks like globally, three of your obs are the only ones of that species! And two of those are in Ohio.
That said, I’m not sure this is exactly what you asked for. I believe this tool presents “X obs in the world” and not “X obs within the filter area”, so if you’re filtering by Ohio and seeing species with only 1 observation, you’re getting species you’ve observed in Ohio, of which your observation is the only one in the world. I checked by comparing a species I’ve observed in Canada that also exists outside of Canada, and the “all” value remained the same both with and without the country filter.
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I’m not aware of an automated way to do this, though I’d also be interested to know! certainly possible to do it manually (and I do), but it’s not very efficient.
perhaps one of the API wizards like @pisum would know…
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I think it’s just slow, if you wait a while it should print the list.
That said, I’m not sure this is exactly what you asked for. I believe this tool presents “X obs in the world” and not “X obs within the filter area”, so if you’re filtering by Ohio and seeing species with only 1 observation, you’re getting species you’ve observed in Ohio, of which your observation is the only one in the world. I checked by comparing a species I’ve observed in Canada that also exists outside of Canada, and the “all” value remained the same both with and without the country filter.
That’s correct. Maybe the last column also should have the filter applied, so then in the example a “1” there would mean 1 observed in Ohio, not 1 in total.
there are lots of ways to get this information. if the earlier suggestions in this thread aren’t working for you, i would:
- get your species in that place
- get all species in that place
- compare the two sets
or you can try one of the other suggestions mentioned here or in other threads in the forum: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-search-for-1st-records-in-a-region/25114/8.
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@whateverwatcher For what it’s worth, I fixed the filtered counts now and made the columns sortable. So if you put in your username and Ohio again, then wait a minute or so, then click the arrow next to “all users”, it should list all the 71 species in Ohio where you have the only observation at the top (count in Ohio is 1, and your count is 1). There is also some where you have 2 or 3 and they are the only 2 or 3 in Ohio, those still can’t be easily counted that way but at least they should be near the top as well.
Myself I only have 2 species in Ohio where it’s the only one and surprisingly, 34 in Austria - I find this really interesting myself now 
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Thank you so much! Sorry i haven’t been on top of this; family in town to visit. Will get back into this soon :)
Does anyone know how to find a list of the species seen in an area filtered in descending order by number of observations?
I feel like that would be a useful thing to know.