I would like to use Inaturalist to show me a list of plant families observed in Hong Kong. I can’t seem to get the explore page to show me this when changing the filters – if I filter by family, it shows me only observations ID’d to family level and not the finer IDs. I tried exploring the taxonomy tree on the “Plant” taxon page, but that is giving me a global list even if I set the “place” to Hong Kong. The “dynamic life list” might work if only I could get it to show me observations in a place rather than a person – not sure if this can be done. Is there any way to bring up a list or view of plant families in a specific place? Not sure if I’m missing a trick here. Thank you very much.
iNaturalist doesn’t really seem to be set up for this. There is a possible way but it’s possibly laborious - or would require coding a HTML parser - as this information is now encoded in the “exclude” function. In principle you can just select observations in an area in Explore and go to species, each species now has full taxonomy in the “exclude” button, so if you parse the page for unique families, you have them. Manually you could just click through the species and exclude family after family until nothing is left.
I see - shame there’s no quick way. Thanks a lot for your explanation.
iNaturalist has an API. I’ve never tried to use it, so I am not familiar with its capability, but it might well be able to do what you want. Possibly
- get a list of observation records for the desired place.
- build a list of genera from that list.
- get the taxonomic data for those genera.
- build a list of families from that data.
The taxa query has a preferred place ID parameter. If this allows filtering by place, you could reduce this to
- get all taxa of rank family present in place.
The quickest and most efficient way might be to filter for all the plant observations in the area you’re interested in, then use the “Download” function to produce a csv file you can then view and manipulate in Excel (or similar). If you go to Section 3 “Choose columns” and deselect everything except “taxon_family_name” in the “Taxon Extras” section, that will give you a csv file containing all the observations in your area, but only listing the families. Deleting the duplicates will leave you with a list of the families in your area. It sounds complicated, but I’ve just done it for my region (there are 178) and it’s much easier to do than explain.
You can CSV download any observations, not just yours? I had no idea! Then that’s clearly the easiest way to go the CSV can then be manipulated in a variety of ways easily.
Oh, awesome. I am trying this right now, and I’m waiting for my download to be ready!
I think the following API request will fetch the information you’re looking for. In JSON format, if you can work with that.
As pointed out below, using rank=family in this API request only returns observations identified specifically at the family level, so it won’t produce a full list of all observed families in Hong Kong.
There is also a checklist for Hong Kong plants (in this link)
(not by families, but a list of observed sp)
Thanks everyone for the generous responses, I really appreciate it! Not being gifted in software engineering, the csv download method (it worked!) is the best solution for me right now – I’m trying fill the gaps in my mental map of my local flora so that I can do a better job at sharing with others on plant walks. What a great resource this site and this community is.
Oh my goodness. This is quite something, thank you!
I believe this will only search observations which are currently identified exactly to family, so any plant families that have been observed there which don’t currently have a family-level observation (because all observations have been identified to a finer level) will not show up.
Good catch! You are completely right, and my apologies for the confusion.