Hey iNat! I’ve recently become interested in learning about regional plants of the world, (i.e plants that are common and very concentrated in specific areas), but searching by location and ordering by number of observations tends to be inefficient (as plants that have a large number of observations period are at the top.) If anybody has any suggestions on how to find this here or elsewhere I would greatly appreciate it.
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One of the issues with trying to use iNat observations that way is that they’re not recording concentration/density of the species in question, they’re recording where people are going and what those people most often notice. There are lots of areas where certain species are very concentrated, but since iNat observers don’t go there those concentrations don’t get recorded. Similarly, in areas where people go they often do not record the most concentrated species in the area because they are common in those areas.
That said, you can play with the heatmap function, just replace the taxon id number with the one for your species in question:
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you can filter for endemic=true status (meaning a plant is found only in a particular place), but this method would rely on the quality of the taxon establishment means setups. (it’s possible establishment means are not set up for a particular place, that they’re defined incorrectly, or that endemic status is set up for a giant place like a continent even when the organism is found only in a tiny part of the place.)
here’s an example of Texas observations of taxa which have endemic=true: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=18&endemic=true.
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however, if you’re searching within a particular place or area and want to get a ratio of obs within the place vs obs outside the place by taxon, this is the way i would approach it: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-find-endemic-species/41139/7.
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