Is it possible to be notified whenever any taxonomic change occurs on one of my observed species?

General
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I’m organizing my photos on a taxonomically ordered Lightroom catalog (maybe a foolish enterprise, but I’m trying to see where it takes me). That is, each photo has hierarchical keywords assigned to it, from Kingdom to subspecies.

Although it will take me some time and work, I believe it is doable. However, I’m worried about a way of keeping it up to date.

What would be the best way of keeping track of any taxonomic changes to my observations? I’m talking not only about changes on the genus or species, but on the whole taxonomic hierarchy.

So, for instance:

  • if a given species changes family;
  • if a family is moved to another order;
  • if a genus is moved to a different or new tribe.
  • etc etc.

Is this possible on iNaturalist? And if yes, how?

I checked this discussion, but I’m not sure it pertains to the same thing…

Thanks in advance

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Taxon changes that affect your observations show up in the feed on your home page for iNat.

Or do you mean a system that emails you if there is a change so you get the notification not on iNat but in your regular email?

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All taxon changes? Or only those at more specific levels?
And is there a way to filter my feed for taxon changes?

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What iNat calls “taxon changes” are changes that involve automatically replacing old IDs with new ones through a swap, merge, or split. There are dashboard notifications for taxon changes, and you can subscribe to get email notifications for these.

It sounds like you are referring to “ancestry changes” where groups are moved around but no IDs are automatically changed. There are no notifications for these. If ancestry changes cause unintended disagreements, curators should be adding comments, IDs, and/or taxon changes for which you might get notifications. You should make a feature request if this is something you would like to be notified for, but given the rumors of revamping the notifications page I don’t know if feature requests like that will be approved.

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I think it’s all taxon changed, but I’m not sure.

I don’t think you can filter your feed for taxon changes, but you can apply some filters on the taxon changes page:

You may be able apply more specific and complicated filters via the URL. I haven’t messed around with that, but possibly someone like @pisum would have more insight on that.

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I stopped getting the email notifications many months ago despite it being turned on. They still turn up in the feed but that’s hit or miss seeing them.

I query via the API periodically using;

https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications.html?current=true&is_change=true&own_observation=true&user_id=YOUR_USER_ID&year=2025&per_page=30&page=1

They’ll be in a nice tabulated table

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first, you need to tie each item in your Lightroom catalog that you want to maintain to an iNat observation. i’m not sure what happens if a given photo is tied to multiple observations (since i don’t have a license for Lightroom to test this).

each time you want to update your catalog, you would get your dynamic life list, and use this to create an ancestry chain for each taxon in your life list.

then you would get observations updated since you last retrieved observations to update your Lightroom catalog. you would update all the catalog items associated with these updated observations, and then you would additionally go through all your catalog items and update their taxonomy metadata using your latest dynamic life list snapshot.

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The idea was to get both taxon and ancestry changes, but from what I could understand from other comments here it will not be that easy.

The API query might work, although in a much more laborsome way. I’ll try it in the future

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Not sure if I understood.

  1. That would all be done manually, correct?
  2. And when you mention “create an ancestry chain using your dynamic life list”, how do you do that? I downloaded my lifelist, but it is not easy to use it to create such an ancestry chain for each taxa (unless I’m missing something)
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you could automate some or all of it. i would automate at least some of the repetitive parts of the things that you would have to run whenever you need to update your catalog.

i would get the data from the underlying API endpoint (https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/taxonomy?user_id=joaolemoslima) and then loop through each taxon, finding its parent taxon and its parent taxon’s ancestors. building the chains in the order that the taxa are returned by the API should be the most efficient way to do this. (or ask a chatbot to parse the list for you, and i bet it could do it.)

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I’m just not sure I am able to code such thing. Not that proficient when it comes to coding

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11 posts were merged into an existing topic: Naturtag - Organize your photo collection with iNat metadata