I’m working on a search URLs how-to for our Help site (help.inaturalist.org) and am hoping to use the top post here (and part 2) as the basis.
Does anyone who’s edited the original wiki post object to my doing this? I will be making some changes to the text and organization, but some of your original work will be there. On the help page I’ll link to the this forum post and make it clear that it’s based on the forum wiki).
No objection here.
Wonderful idea to put this wisdom in a more accessible spot. And, on the off-chance that I am one of the editors (there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to search for edits by author), I have no objections.
For location – how to filter for –
Southern Africa NOT Cape Floristic Region
?
Is there a way to filter observations that don’t have annotations in 2 different fields?
For example, I’m casually working on annotating life stage of lepidoptera, it’s easy to bulk edit and most times by just the preview I can know what’s the life stage. As I’m doing it, I’m also inputting evidence of presence as organism and alive/dead. I’m currently filtering with without_term_id=1 to check those that don’t have the life stage annotation. The issue is, there’s a LOT of observations that are already annotated as leaf mine or construction, which is in evidence of presence and there’s no life stage to input, so I have to manually filter them out by checking reviewed on them. I tried without_term_id=22 but there are a lot more observations that have the life stage annotation but don’t have the evidence of presence (ie: the month of feb/2026 is currently at ~79k observations without life stage, while there are ~109k without evidence of presence [ETA: that’s only “Needs ID” observations, not including “Research Grade” ones]), so I’d be manually filtering out a lot more observations.
I’d much rather do something like without_term_id=1,22 to filter out observation where both fields are empty, but it returns 0 observations when I do that… Is this possible to do in any other way?
You can do this with a combination of annotation filters and project filters, or simply project filters. Combining the two is really powerful.
Here’s a link to Lepidoptera without any life stage or evidence of presence annotations
And the same result, this time combining project and annotation filters
They have slightly different numbers. I think this MIGHT have to do with disagreeing annotations, but I’m not completely positive. The one using just project filters has more observations.
Is there a way to find observations in the identify modal that do not have any active infraspecific IDs? The change to the way these work has left me with a little difficulty. I’d like to find observations of Volucella bombylans to which no one has yet added a ‘form’ ID, but limiting the low rank to species no longer acheives this because I still get all the observations that have just one form ID. I think what I could do with is a ‘without_ident_taxon_id=’…