How to make a quick photographic field guide for a specific area?

General
1

Let’s say I’m interested in a bird list of a certain area:

I start at the explore page:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations

I zoom in on my area of interest and draw a boundary (in the map tab).
E.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?nelat=-37.55170559033029&nelng=145.55671652936454&subview=map&swlat=-37.90362492684759&swlng=145.08430441998954&view=species&iconic_taxa=Aves

Put a filter on “birds” and then switch from the “map” tab to the “species” tab:

afbeelding
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Now I have a problem… since the species are ordered on the number of observations for that area (that could be convenient, but not for my question),
I would like to have this overview but then ordered on taxonomy.
So all ducks together, all parrots together, etc… And not based on the number of observations, but most related species are shown together.

Actually I’d like to make a quick photographic field guide per area of interest per taxonomic group.

How do I do that in iNaturalist? I wasn’t able to find this out myself… The filter options don’t seem to help here.

2 Likes
2

I think there is an open request to arrange that display by taxonomy.
Most obs is not a useful choice to most of us.

3

Have you experimented with the Guides feature? https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/

4

It is a useful choice when I want to avoid uploading more overobserved species and focus on underobserved species. If the default is changed to taxonomic, I hope that we will be able at least to toggle it to descending by number of observations.

1 Like
5

Improving that interface/menu is surely a logical step. Having the ability to filter and sort the species one has seen by ascending/descending order or # of obs. and by taxonomic order, etc. should definitely be implemented.

1 Like
6

You might try eBird’s illustrated checklists. If the region is too small there will not be photos for everything, but for larger regions, it works pretty well.

7

That would be great! Most obs is however also usefull for me, both would be great features

1 Like
8

Yes, but then you need to know which species occur. And then there’s a problem in iNat: it only shows the first 2000 species (this might be a problem with large groups like plants in a bit larger area) and only the most observed, so you will never know which rarer species also occur in that area.

9

yes both would be great

10

The birds was only an example. I’m actually also interested in the more obscure species groups.

What can I expect when I go to a certain area? Is my question. To answer this, you like to have the taxonomic ordering and the most obs ordering. You actually need them both.

11

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