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

Tutorials
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123

I think you are right, that capability does not yet exist. Consider posting a Feature Request forum topic for it.

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124

I would like to filter for observations that have only 1 or 2 identifications, regardless of quality level and regardless of whether they agree, although being able to filter for ones that agree and ones that don’t agree would be nice too.

I know I saw something like this recently, but I’ve just spent 20 minutes looking for it and have become annoyed :-)

Thanks for any help!

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125

Can anyone show me how to use the fabled “&without_field=”, I can’t find a working example.

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It used to work through the identify modal… but looks like it stopped working recently:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/filtering-to-observations-without-a-specified-field/5552/12
earlier in that topic it is explained how it was accessed

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127

There is actually a trick you can do to make it easier.

The tricky part is all the html encoding for the spaces etc - so let the system do that for you.

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128

Thanks, but two points: First you’ve got a “:” instead of “=” on the end of the “without_field” parameter. And second, that search produces exactly the same number of results when you edit the URL and remove the “without_field” parameter.

I added the field to one observation on the first page of that search, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30497029, and it still comes up (and on page 5 of that search https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30448722 comes up, there are only about 2500 of 169000 observations with that field)

So where did we get the information that this ever worked?

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129

If you try the first step, you will see that it has a colon in the URL generated, not an equal sign. I dont know if there is some html reencoding that goes on, but the process creates a URL with a colon.

The first search produces (as I write this) 2,501 results. I’m not surprised is a low number, I can’t imagine many people are able to identify or recognize skippers larva, and no one ever really fills in the adult annotation

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The second URL generates 169k

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If you replace the colon in the URL with an equal sign, then it fails.

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130

My point is that the results are wrong, the 169000 results are not observations without the field, eg my two examples (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30497029, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30448722). I expect the other 2500 observations are in there too.

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131

https://inaturalist.nz/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&user_id=kiwifergus
4725 total obs

https://inaturalist.nz/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&field:Accession%20number&user_id=kiwifergus
422 with the accession field

https://inaturalist.nz/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&without_field:Accession%20number&user_id=kiwifergus
4725 without the accession field ???

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132

The earliest suggestion that this parameter exists that I can find is:

@karoopixie where did you get this from?

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@kueda might be able to comment with whether it is actually possible to filter on observations that don’t have a specific field assigned. It had been previously suggested to use “without_field:fieldname”, but that does not appear to give the correct result.

134

Tony, this did used to work! I have bookmarked filters that I used all the time. So I know the bookmarked parameters were correct at one stage. When the filtered search wasn’t working (see the other thread you’ve linked), I tried changing the = to a : and I also tried changing the + to %20 and to normal spaces, and for some reason none of these things worked anymore. But they did used to!

That’s why I asked @tiwane on that thread if something has been changed by the devs, but I have not received a reply to that (yet). Tony Iwane gets tagged all over the place, so I’m sure it’s in his queue of things to do :-) Kiwifergus has tagged Ken-ichi here too, so I’m certain we’ll get some clarification at some point.

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135

But where did it first come to light? Was it something found by trial and error, or something suggested by an admin/developer?

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Sjoe, Tony, I don’t recall exactly, it was a couple of years ago! Pretty sure it came from @tonyrebelo who would have got it from the admins? It was when we migrated all our iSpot obs to iNat and I needed to add ispot fields so that we could cross-reference.

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The API documentation still has without_term_id in it, but that works on annotations, not fields, I wonder if it got changed that ?

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Is it possible to exclude a certain tag from a search? I want to get results from all of my observation in a certain area, but exclude those with a specific tag word.
In Explore, the URL has tags as ‘q=tag’, but neither ‘without_q’ nor ‘not_q’ excludes them

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Not on the website, but you can export your observations and filter the column tag_list.

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140

Greetings everyone! Adding my enthusiasm for this post.

I have another query - how would I filter for records that are missing their observation date? We have several collection projects set up for flowering plants, and while exploring the data found quite a few with a missing date. Active users have often been happy to add them, making the record eligible for RG. So a filter term to pick these out from other Casual observations would be really helpful.

The same is true for missing location, come to think of it, but missing date seems to be more common.

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141

Similarly, being able to filter for observations that have something in the Placeholder would be really helpful (too easy for these to get overwritten and effectively lost)

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142

The same questions were asked here:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/searching-obs-with-no-date/5118
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/find-exclude-observations-without-a-location/3571/

I don’t know of a way to find observaitons missing dates or locations, or those that have a placeholder, by using search filters on the website. I don’t think it is possible.

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