How to use iNaturalist's Search URLs - wiki part 1 of 2

If you look in the upper left corner of the thumbnail of the Jumping Spider, you will see that you have been given credit of the first observation.
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/vermont-us#q=Pseudeuophrys%2Berratica
My thought is this is the first posted observation not the earliest observation date. Another thought as well is that the observation needs to reach RG (confirmed).

As for the walkingstick, for some reason your observation is not research grade and is possibly not first. Currently, someone else holds that distinction.
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/vermont-us#q=Aralia%2Bspinosa

Thanks. The walkingstick isnā€™t research grade yet because there was some uncertainty related to its range expansion into Vermont, but the same specimen was observed a year later by someone else, whose observation did end up making research grade. Oh well, this isnā€™t really the topic for that. Iā€™ll check out the feature you posted about.

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Is there a way to limit an ā€œIdentifyā€ search to observations that have been given IDs by a particular user? There are a few very prolific problematic identifiers, and it would be nice to be able to easily check through them.

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This one will work:

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Sorry, I was intentionally ignoring you Iā€™d just missed your reply.

In hindsight I donā€™t think the use case mattered (other than for curiosity, I always find it interesting to see how people are using iNaturalist and might find something I could use myself). I often ask people why they want to do something though since Iā€™ve come across situations where asking why has meant that someone has realised there is another way of achieving their aim. Most people (including me) are often very bad at thinking of all the alternative ways of doing something.

It might be possible to do the ā€œmore than 3 weeks agoā€ search using a javascript bookmarklet to calculate the date 3 weeks ago then insert it into the url. Iā€™m not sure exactly how to do it or 100% sure thatā€™s possible (Iā€™ve never created a bookmarklet, and donā€™t currently use javascript enough to be fluent).

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Is there a way to build a query for observations by taxon name, rather than taxon codes?

Iā€™m trying to create a link to iNaturalist observations of taxa in a curated project to link to from a Flora, so people can easily access a repository of images in iNaturalist that fulfil a set of quality criteria (from a defined area, research grade only, and with one of our staff having contributed an identification, among others).

I can easily construct a URL for all the criteria I need, except being able to search for a taxon by name. In order to use numbers Iā€™d have to manually look up the taxon codes, which introduces too much maintenance burden for this feature to be feasible.

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yeah, just taxa/your search term here: http://inaturalist.org/taxa/bouteloua%20curtipendula

Thanks @bouteloua, Iā€™m looking for an observation search URL, rather than to search for the taxon. So I would like to be able to search for observations of a taxon using the taxon name in the query string, rather than its code. I hope it makes better sense now!

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https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_name=Bouteloua%20curtipendula

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Thanks @JeremyHussell, that works.

For some reason I had tried the taxon_name= syntax before and got nowhere. I wonder what I got wrong.

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I added a section to the wiki for this one, just under ā€œSearch for Multiple Taxa.ā€ There are some limitations mentioned there that you might have run up against. For spaces you can use either %20 or +

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This was brought up a couple of posts above yours, and unfortunately itā€™s not available in the current API search capabilities. See the link there for a place to request it.

On more investigation, this is not particularly useful in complex queries that have a chance of returning no matching results. When there are no matching results on taxon name, it shows all results that match the other criteria.

Added related feature request here.

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Would you give us an example of a search with taxon_name which returns results from other taxa? I wasnā€™t able to find any which behave that way in a few minutes of messing around, so it sounds like there might be some specific trigger.

If you take your Bouteloua curtipendula URL above, and change it to Bouteloua curtipendulus, it returns all iNaturalist observations of all taxa.

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Ah, I get it now. Thanks for the clarification. I focused too much on the ā€œcomplex queriesā€ part, thinking it meant that adding a bunch of other parameters like place, time, and person caused the search to return wrong results.

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Thanks for jumping in while I was away from the computer @jdmore

Here are two examples using a more complex query.

This one works:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_name=Aristotelia+peduncularis&project_id=vascular-flora-of-tasmania&ident_user_id=mftasp,mattintas

This one does not, and instead returns all records that fulfil the rest of the criteria:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_name=Gunnera+cordifolia&project_id=vascular-flora-of-tasmania&ident_user_id=mftasp,mattintas

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@mftasp after some more experimenting, I added more information to the wiki section regarding synonyms and common names. These will work using the same search parameter. But if they are not unique in iNaturalist (e.g., used for more than one taxon), it will only return results for one of the taxa.

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Love this, great information. I was trying to figure out how to add observation tag values to search strings, which is super useful. However, I noticed that when the tag is a taxon tag (e.g., Host Plant ID), results are returned only for exact matches and do not including daughter taxa. This makes sense, but in some cases it would be even more useful if I could, for example, get results with a tag containing a genus OR any species in that genus. For example, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=33779&field:Host%20Plant%20ID=53854 returns observations in Leafminers of North America that have the tag Host Plant ID = Ilex, but not those with Host Plant ID = Ilex opaca (or any other Ilex identified beyond genus). Would be nice if it could do the latter as well. Also, looks like it doesnā€™t allow you to search multiple taxon ids at once by concatenating with a comma.

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