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

5 Likes

2 posts were split to a new topic: How to filter to identify all observations of a species?

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: How to filter to identify all observations of a species?

In explore filters, you can restrict observations to a date range or a specific date. Can the same thing be done with times? I have a big need for this. I will often do inaturalist plant observations in the field and later upload them, but also collect a specimen and mark it with masking tape annotated with time of day. Then when I get back home, I add more photos with the scope. It can be difficult to find which observation the specimen belongs to without a time search. Sometimes I might have 200 observations in a day, making it a lot of observations to weed through. I can filter by genus or other rank which helps, but sometimes this isn’t possible.

2 Likes

Yes, but you need to include the offset (time zone adjustment) or it will otherwise use UTC.

So this is for observations made locally in CDT (5 hour offset from UTC) between 10am and 11am: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?d1=2020-10-25T10:00-05:00&d2=2020-10-25T11:00-05:00&place_id=1859

5 Likes

This thread is maybe also related.
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/have-a-time-shift-feature-available-for-search-urls-or-in-search-menu/16500

1 Like

How do users (or is there even a way to) exclude something in a search? In other words, can I search all records for my state “except” from my county . . . or search for all records in my county “except” mine . . . or all Lepidoptera “except” butterflies. ??? Some of my iNatruralist observations are related to my current employment, and it would be very useful to be able to show what impact I have had on the number of species recorded in my county and state, by any given month, and this seems like the best way to do that. Thoughts?

Have you looked at the section on exclusion searches? More details can also be found in the earlier sections, e.g. to understand more about without_taxon_id, you can look at the section on taxon_id.

2 Likes

I think that all filters, such as “&without_taxon_id=47122”, should be available in all pages (wherever filtering is relevant).

As long as it will not be the case, there will be requests to add filters.
(See for instance the new Life List discussion).

For convenience, add a Filters button in all pages (wherever filtering is relevant), always with all options.

image

Such an homogeneity across pages would also contribute to simplicity of use.
It would be incentive and we would have just to learn to use one filtering tool.

3 Likes

I’ve been working with the Wiki page, but for excluding myself (user) it says that you have to “(note: must use their number, not their name)”. I don’t see any number in the URL representing me, as I do with just about anything and everything else. Am I reading that wrong? I tried my user name “kcthetc1”, and nothing happened, the thing kept going round and round and no data loaded. ???

here’s yours. 2081962
found it by going to your profile from this page… not sure how else to get it to appear.

2 Likes

Unfortunately &exact_taxon_id=47903 does not seem to work :(
Is there another operator I could use?

exact_taxon_id only works in Identify, not Explore. If you’re trying to get only observations where the observation taxon is currently Family Cactaceae in Explore, search with Cactaceae as your taxon, and set the high and low ranks to Family.

1 Like

Many thanks for pointing out this useful feature of the Filters panel.

Is there a way to exclude observations that are introduced? There is a way to only include them.

&introduced=false

&introduced=true will show only introduced observations (to the extent that correct Establishment Means have been set)

Omitting the parameter shows both. I’ll get this into the wiki, since the filter interfaces only offer the “true” option.

1 Like

Is there a way to search for observations that have previously had a particular identification that is no longer the active community identification? I might need this to reverse a rather large taxon merge I made a few days ago.

@tiwane
@bouteloua

Cheers!

1 Like

Not exactly what you are searching for, but this is url which shows observations where yours is the maverick ID. (Everybody else: replace the user_id with their own if you would like to see your maverick IDs)

There is no way to do this directly through an observation search. The only way to find identifications of an inactive taxon is via an identification search, from which you can link to the affected observations one at a time. Use

https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?taxon_id=878711&current=any

and substitute the taxon_id number with the number of the inactive taxon. To see that number, you may need to go to the taxon change record that inactivated it, and hover over the link to the inactivated taxon.

Thanks. That will work fine if needed.
Just curious, the result page has a link “View with test=idcats”, how is this different from the normal “View”?

1 Like