I’m part of a group setting up a moth sheet at night. We often get the first time a species has been recorded in the county.
Figuring out which are state/county firsts is tedious as we go through the species and check manually. It’s mostly for our own curiosity. Is there an easier way to know when you have a first species regional sighting like this?
If you get all the taxons you observed in a list you can do the following search
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?view=species&list_id=[your list_id here]&place_id=[your county’s place_id here]
Then you will see all the moths you observed, sorted by the number of total observations in your county. Scrolling to the bottom should allow you to see all the moths that have only been seen once in your county (though I guess you should be careful if you uploaded multiple observations of the same species).
How you make the list depends a bit on your setup (are all the observations being uploaded to the same account?) but you can use this to help automate it.
If there isn’t a recent published list for the area you are interested in, I guess it would be most efficient for you to compile one rather than check each species that is new to you against all the other sources of records.
Wouldn’t this only show sightings recorded on iNaturalist?
You don’t explain what you mean by “check manually”, so it’s unclear what process you are trying to improve upon. But FYI, if you don’t already know, if you click on a species name on the iNaturalist website a couple of times, you get to a page that lists the “Total observations” for the species (as well as top identifier, etc.) If you click on “filter by place” in the top right-hand corner, you can select your county of interest. And it will then display the number of observations in that county – and that filter will remain selected throughout your iNaturalist session until you change it. So, thereafter, you can find out if there are other iNaturalist records of an individual species in a county just by clicking twice on the species name.
I think she is only asking about iNaturalist sightings – she would need to state her region otherwise, because different regions have different sources for records.
The local provincial or state level Conservation Data Centre/Natural Heritage Information Centre, etc. should usually maintain a list of all species reliably known from their jurisdiction, and can probably provide the most recently updated lists of taxa known from your area.
These lists will draw from sources beyond iNaturalist such as museum collections, published and unpublished surveys, etc.
Its my expectation that iNaturalist will eventually become the system of record for a lot of the natural history world. It scales well, its affordable, and its practical.
I’m the webmaster for the Ohio Odonata Society, https://www.ohioodonatasociety.org/, and our site has county level records for all the damselfly and dragonfly species observed in the US State of Ohio. We are now collecting all new records using iNat, and every winter, we combine the new records with our existing database, which includes records back to the 19th century.
Before setting up our site, I reviewed a lot of natural history websites across the USA, Canada, and a few in other countries. My impression was that they generally weren’t very good, and my belief is that’s because both the statistical maintenance, and the website sharing, are relatively difficult, and beyond the capabilities of most regional natural history societies. Here in Ohio, the moss community and the birders are the only other ones I’m aware of that have reliable county level species records online. The others are way out of date, or haven’t even started.
What iNat has demonstrated to a significant degree is that most natural history categories can usefully share a non-specialized system. We don’t need eDragonfly, eBeetle, eMammal, etc. And I also don’t see it practical for every regional natural history community to do their own work from scratch. I’d like to see state-level initiatives serving every category. I believe that Maryland and North Carolina both do this.
iNat can’t provide the curation that a regional or state body can, and right now, its unlikely to contain many pre-digital records, but its a lot better than nothing. In many categories, in many locations, iNat provides a very useful record of what has been observed. While that might not be fully satisfying, the pre-digital records were pretty limited too. Just because a small group of people didn’t collect a certain species and put it in a museum during the last century or two doesn’t mean that the species wasn’t there at the time, or before taxonomies and systematic collecting became a practice. My Ohio county shows 662 species of Butterflies & Moths in iNat–I really don’t believe that so many species had been confirmed in the county previous to iNat.
A county first may not remain the sole record. But if the observations were sorted in ascending order by date of observation, that would reveal which one was the first.
Yes but it sounds like they are checking for county firsts soon after setting up the moth sheet so it seems unlikely many other records will have appeared in the intervening time.
If you want to check long after it would require something either much more laborious (going through the species individually as you suggest) or good understanding of the iNaturalist API.
yes to just inaturalist sightings. sorry for confusion
This has been an aggravation of mine for iNaturalist for the past few years, as I am so used to using eBird. I finally joined the iNat forum recently after being a long time lurker and I’ve been meaning to submit a feature request for the ability to sort iNat data in the same way eBird can sort data: you can view every species seen in a county by the date it was added to the county list. And the date acts as a hyperlink to the checklist where it was first seen. I have been curating a few projects for the past few years and now that there have been 12k observations and almost 2k species, it’s gotten impossible to figure out which new ones were added. And unless I’ve been using iNat wrong this entire time, you can only sort observations by ascending date, not species, and therefore that doesn’t get you any closer to figuring out if the species was a new addition to a project or county.
https://kildor.name/inat/new-species
I found this link a while back on an old forum when I was looking for a way to list new species I had observed. You can input the inat location number and specified dates and it will show all new species level observations. I hope this helps.
I would say there is no simple way to be sure you know. Or at least where I live.
Usually I check three sites and if all three have no prior data I would call that “probably new to the county”. But I can never be sure because there is always data which hasn’t been inputted into iNat, GBIF and bryophyteportal yet.
I think as of the internet era a lot of herbaria are still catching up on trying to digitize their older records going back centuries so a lot of what’s come in since circa 2000 hasn’t been looked at or catalogued yet.
I volunteer at a herbarium sometimes and usually we’re processing collections from around '05-'15 or so.
I do similar, but at state level. I have a project for my state that I have to keep track of the RG observations. I pull info from the kildor.name link posted above, and have an Excel spreadsheet that I can tell what is a new species for the Project. With it in Excel I can also look up to the GBIF data pulled, older moth checklists for the state.
I still usually just say it is a “possible” 1st record, knowing I don’t have an exhaustive checklist, yet, for the state.