Any suggestions for other identification achievements?
This is so awesome. I was an addicted achievement hunter back in the day on the xbox. I even volunteered on TrueAchievements in a few roles, so this is incredible!
I have cleaned up on the Identifications achievements, and am only missing the Extinct in the Wild Spotter from the Conservation category, and Superstar from the Community category (one observation is at 9, so I’m close).
Could you have a ‘Platinum’ achievement for each of those categories (borrowing from PlayStation) if someone has got all achievements within that category?
disagreeable.
There seems to be a bug in Fish Expert - it’s showing 0/100 for me, but should be showing 3/100. (Showing counts on the achievements is great UI design, BTW.)
It looks like an issue with the api, check here: ons/iconic_taxa_species_counts?user_id=jeremyhussell&captive=false&verifiable=true&fields=taxon.name. It does not return fish results. I will see if I can fix it.
Just came to comment that I’m seeing the same thing, no fish.
It should be fixed now! I implemented some changes including improvements on the speed of the page, it should load everything way faster now, I disabled a couple of achievements that are not easy to do at the moment because there is no easy way to get the data from the api
Confirmed, seems to be working now for me!
I like it! I can’t even say which achievement is my favourite. I have 30 unicorns, but just one whale. 
Some thoughts: I don’t know how you are supposed to observe a species extinct in the wild. That would be in a zoo, and so it’s captive and doesn’t count.
And strangely in Diversity Day, Biodiversity Blitz and World Traveller I have nothing. Maybe (WIP) means “work in progress” and is not yet counting?
Thanks! I didn’t have the patience to wait for it to load all my observations before haha. I love the rarity achievements, very curious how you did them. I’d also love to know equivalents for states and countries, e.g. species where I have the only observation in a country.
Scimitar-horned Oryx was classified as extinct in the wild while having a feral population in Texas. According to Wikipedia it was downlisted in 2023 due to a reintroduced population in Chad, but there are RG observations on iNat from Chad, Morocco, and Tunisia from reintroduction projects before then (with debates about their captivity status in the comments of some). Perhaps there are other loopholes like that…
(bug report here)
I have 56/75, not bad. I need more continents and mammals!
i think you should use /v1/observations/taxonomy instead. you can parse that to get almost all of your taxonomy-related metrics, including the taxon-specific ones like bees and raptors and such. i think you’re getting multiple pages of /observations/species to get the taxon-specific stuff, and i don’t think that’s necessary.
you might also be relying on /observations/species for conservation status totals, but that’s probably best done using /v2/observations?per_page=0, plus cs=ex, cs=en, native=true, endemic=true, introduced=true, threatened=true, csi=vu, or csi=nt. (i think these are more accurate at the observation level than at the species level, since some of these may vary by place). you can also use the same concept to get continent counts.
Terrific tool, I love it. Feeling good about my progress
I was going to comment the same, if the tool is looking for RG or eligible for RG observations for this achievement, it’s pretty difficult to imagine how it’d work for most EW species if any!
That being said, this is a really cool tool, it’s sad that there’s so much hesitation and negativity about it, it’s fun and it actually is useful–if you have thousands of observations and want a summary of what you’ve already done to get a better sense of blind spots, or understanding of what you’re already doing well, it’s great!
I do see it could have potential issues, but those potential issues exist even without such tools. For years I was dealing with a user who I think was obsessed with getting new species on their list, even when they weren’t found in the State! They’d also mark pre-emptively mark everything as wild, even when it was obviously planted, and frame their photos to hide the cultivated nature of many plants. This went on for years before they finally got banned, not sure what finally put it over the edge though.
All this just to say, any “bad-faith” observations from anyone seeking some sort of badge or achievement are already going on, and it’s a separate issue that the platform needs to deal with independently, rather than hiding useful and interesting stats to prevent possible data quality issues.
I like it. What about ‘countries observed in’ (and perhaps there’s scope for identifications in countries/continents?) under the geography and seasons section?
I clearly need to spend more time looking for amphibians, reptiles, fish and cetaceans…
There are species that are now listed as extinct in the wild that living people have observed. For example, iNat has a record of Slender-billed Curlew.
Someone might have suggested this already, but what about an achievement for the FIRST observation of a species? One of my 2 Unicorns has 7 records, for which mine is the earliest observed.
that’s hard to quantify in iNaturalist. suppose a taxon swap happens, and 500 observations get moved to a new taxon. who is first in that case? or suppose observer A submits an observation for taxon X for 2021-01-01 on 2025-01-01, and observer B submits an observation for taxon X for 2024-12-31 on 2024-12-31. who is first? then suppose observer C submits an observation for 2024-12-30 on 2024-12-30, but it doesn’t get identified as taxon X until 2025-01-02. now who’s first?
Some species were extinct in their original location but are now present in other places (captive or naturalized population outside their historic range). From what I found so far, there are very few examples of that, so probably this achievement is one of the hardest ones to get right now. Here are the examples I found so far:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/372372-Diplazium-laffanianum
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/126914-Brugmansia-arborea
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/154768-Brugmansia-suaveolens