I have a project (Ballard oasis) where I’ve been keeping track of everything I can that shows up in my yard. I’ve been wondering if there’s a way to count the number of species that visit a certain species of plant. I know can count these manually or maybe try to download my data and use Excel but I was wondering if there’s a better way to do this.
you don’t have that many records. so then you could just download your data, making sure you download the taxon field and the “url for partner observation” observation field that you’re using to tie your insects to your plants.
in Excel, i would start by pulling out your observations with the observation field, and use that as your primary set. the rest will be a secondary set for lookup purposes. in your primary set, use a lookup formula to get the taxon of the “partner” observation, matching the url in the observation field (or the observation id extracted from that url) to a record in the secondary set. that will give you a plant taxon tied to an arthropod taxon in the primary set.
from there, you can count distinct arthropod taxa for each plant taxon in the primary set, and just sort by that distinct count.
Hi! You can easily do this through my free to use web app that I created that interprets your CSV file and added observation fields into a visual chart. This must be done from a (Desktop or Laptop browser). If you happen to load the sample file on accident, just refresh the page to upload your own file.
https://stratified.william-dawson0526.workers.dev/
Once you upload your CSV (with field observations) head to the “Interaction Network” Chart Tab up at the top of the browser. Then refer to the “How to use this” button on the far right.
Now there are multiple ways in which you could do this, but you have to make sure that you are keeping the same format across all observations. In this case - on your insect IDs you would use the field observation “associated plant” and then enter the Plant ID. Once all the FOs are setup in your observations then you export and plop it into stratified and follow the directions above. You can head over to data and columns and it will immediately tell you the number of observations with that field. The chart will break it down by utilizing the Main Menu Sidebar which is all explained in the “How to”.
If you happen to do plain text and no IDs you must make sure they are all the same entry or the field will parse separately. (for example, say you did a text field “crawling” - then if you want to use that repeatedly for others.) there is no limit to the number of text fields you make, they can be added from the sidebar menu if you scroll to the bottom.
These are all the observations that the app covers:
- name of associated plant
- eating (ID)
- host plant id
- insect host plant (ID)
- multiple life stages - adult
- number of individuals
- # of birds
- % of fresh flowers open?
- behavior of bird
- bird using habitat
- copulating
- diseased or infected
- evidence of predation
- flower or flower buds?
- glaucous leaves
- how was it found? (under cover, on the crawl, basking, dead on road, etc.)
- insect behavior
- insect on flower
- insect on plant part
- insects
- interaction (predation)
- interaction → behaviour
- interaction->mutualism with
- interaction->parasitoid of
- larvae or pupae
- lek posturing
- mating behavior
- mating behavior observed?
- mating specimens?
- multiple life stages - larva
- multiple species
- multiple species observed?
- nectar / pollen delivering plant
- nest construction
- nest placement
- on leaf
- perching on
- plant family
- plant id
- plant phenophase
- pollen on insect
- pollination interaction
- predating
- predation observed
- seeds present?
- what was it eating?
doesn’t sound easy / efficient if the user has to redo all the source data.
pisum speaks out of long experience on iNat. I am sorry you perceive his discussion as ‘against you’. There is an earlier thread where he asked a few questions, to understand what that iNatter wanted to do with their data. Not an ‘attack’ but refining the question to get the right answer for them.
I prefer a graphic to a table of data, but I also prefer words, a paragraph of text to strings of numbers.
As long as they make sure to always use the same URL for that observation field, they can simply click the name of the observation field on any of the insect obs and click “Observations with this field and value”, which willl take them here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&field:URL%20for%20"partner"%20observation=https:%2F%2Fwww.inaturalist.org%2Fobservations%2F388588757
Then they can navigate the species and observations tab and use any of the regular inat filters in it without needing to fiddle with downloads and spreadsheets
Actually, its quite easy to create a project (digital fence) to contain the set of observations that you want to narrow down on. Then you can flip through those quickly adding annotations and using arrow keys (specifically from the “identification” tab in iNat) to add the field observations. I did this with about 6 hours of work for ~750 observations in a project called “East Austin Yard Project”. My main goal was to connect Bombus species to the pollinator plants they visited, but of course there were many other insects that I added observations to. Not everything is going to be immediate, some things take a little patience and work.
i don’t think the URL will always be the same because the plants will be found in different observations. it’s a useful feature for other reasons, but i don’t think it addresses the thing described in the original post.
Ah, I just realised that I read the description and ignored the title, thanks. I thought OP just wanted to see the details for one individual plant.
if you decide to switch over from using “url for partner observation” to an observation field of type taxon… you could probably use the meta data tool to add the new observation field since many of your “url for partner observation” repeat. then you could see close to what I think you want to see on inat itself rather than in excel.
if you’d like me to add obs fields to a few of your observations to show u what I mean, i’d be happy to.
Example from my yard…
Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa)
False Solomon’s Seal (Maianthemum racemosum)
Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum)
etc…
Maybe this isn’t what you’re talking about tho. Not sure.
This is exactly what I want. I definitely prefer being able to see the results in iNaturalist and have the data continually updated without having to download and manipulate data every time I want an answer to a question. Thanks!
I can also see which fields to add from your examples. There are so many features in iNaturalist that aren’t obvious to inexperienced users like me. Once again, thanks!
you may want to be somewhat careful when choosing a specific field. I use “plant that the organism was found on” because others in my yard umbrella use the same field. In Seattle, the most common one being used in 2026 is associated species with names lookup
But the number of uses can be heavily influenced by a small number of power users. What I like about “associated species with names lookup” is others in your region are using it and it’s very broad. This helps if you want to further filter by more granular observation fields (now that I know the plant that the insect was on… what did I perceive the insect to be doing there?)
e.g.
Insects visiting the flower of Butterfly Milkweed vs.
Larva visiting Butterfly Milkweed vs.
All visitors to Butterfly Milkweed
There are sooo many taxon type observation fields that conflate “found on” with an insect interaction, the part of the plant where it was found, etc. It seems like it would be better to do it this way but it means that it’s difficult to see the holistic value of a plant without extracting the data and doing an external join.