How to search for 1st Records in a "region"

General
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the thing that upupa-epops mentioned is the first thing that i thought of when you mentioned this particular eBird page, but i think the way you’re using that page is sorting by date added desc and then looking for recent additions, and i don’t think that iNaturalist place page allows you to do anything similar.

there is an /identificaitons/recent_taxa API endpoint that i occasionally use to detect when there are new species added to a project. (i used it to clear up a lot of mistaken identifications in my local CNC project the last go-around.) i’ve written a page that helps display the API’s response in a way that is a little more user-friendly, although the output is still a little quirky.

here’s some additional discussion about the recent_taxa endpoint:

there’s also a “new species in project” tool that someone else wrote that may be useful for species detection. i haven’t really looked at it much, but i think it operates on either observed or submitted date rather than identification date, which i think is less ideal for rapid detection, though there are pros and cons of both approaches.

you could also run the thing that barnabywalters mentions above, but it may be less user-friendly if you’re not comfortable running python.

if you’re thinking about something like what the date-added-sorted eBird first lists does, there’s not an easy way to do that without running a CSV export that contains all observations in your set and then aggregating those results to get the min(observed date) or min(submitted date) – or min(id) as a proxy for min(submitted date) – for each taxon. i sort of talk about how to do that in https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-search-for-first-observations-in-my-state-mine/21762/6, and i assume barnabywalter’s thing is doing something similar, except in python.

if instead you’re thinking about creating a graph of species counts over time, then you could also parse out a CSV, but i think doing something like what’s mentioned in the posts below is probably easier:

you could also modify https://observablehq.com/@robin-song/inaturalist-api-example-2 slightly to achieve the same kind of thing as what’s described above. (if you want more detailed steps, let me know.)

ok. so really you’re trying to compare 2 sets of observations (your project vs everything recorded in the area). this is tricky because of the large number of observations / species involved in the 2 sets. you can use iNaturalist’s experimental compare tool do do this for sets that include fewer than 500 species (or, really, taxon leaves). see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/tracking-species-not-yet-seen-during-city-nature-challenge/1266/2 for an example.

you can work around the 500 species limitation of the tool by breaking your taxa up into logical groups of taxa. alternatively, you can get the complete lists of the taxa from your 2 sets using the API’s observations/species_counts. and then compare those 2 lists yourself. if you’re not familiar with how to interact with the API directly, this page described here might help: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/viewing-species-in-a-project-beyond-the-top-500/11420/10.