Description of need:
Right now, I have two options for tree view, but neither of them give me the information I want. Simplified taxonomy is extremely coarse, in my case collapsing all my butterfly and moth observations into one clump:
This seems like a level of detail that people are very rarely going to need (and I of course would be happy for this view to persist for those who do). But what seems like a much more practical view many would appreciate would be only listing the ranks which are polytypic with respect to your lifelist, that is those where you have observed at least two distinct subordinate taxons. I am interested in the fact that my Monarch and Gulf Fritillary are both brush-footed butterflies! I do not need to be told that my Ranchman’s tiger moth observation is my only Genus Arctia observation is my only Subtribe arctiinia observation is my only… every time, and it adds a giant amount of clutter to the view. The browser game Metazooa takes an approach like that I’m suggesting:
Looking back I feel like my description is way too technical, so if your eyes glazed over all I mean is a tree view which only shows the “branching” taxa in your lifelist. So something like detailed view but if you have one observation in a family, then that, the subfamily, the tribe, the genus… all get collapsed into one node on the tree.
the sort of view you’re proposing is probably not generalizable because in iNaturalist you can have observations identified to different taxon levels. so suppose you have 4 observations in total: 2 at Rudbeckia amplexicaulis, 1 at Rudbeckia section Dracopis, and 1 at genus Rudbeckia. Rudbeckia amplexicaulis is a child of section Dracopis which is a child of genus Rudbeckia. so if you display only Rudbeckia amplexicaulis without its ancestors, you lose the fact that there are observations at section and genus.
if you want to make your own life list, you can do that relatively easily. just export your lifelist data and manipulate it to your heart’s content. you can also get the data from an undocumented API endpoint. for example, here’s a webpage that i made displaying your lifelist date: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_taxonomy?user_id=yongestation.
Yeah you’re right as stated that would be a problem. I guess I was really envisioning including a node at every level you have at least one observation as well (we’d need to include species level ones anyways even though they don’t strictly meet my criteria). But as to your broader point, I think you might be right that this is something I should just try coding myself.
On another note, thank you so much for all the tools you’ve built! I’m not much of a programmer, so I’ve relied on your website a bunch. I especially use this page to figure out what creatures to look out for when going somewhere new (I’m always curious what creatures have the highest ratio of observations in the place I am visiting to total observations).
An easy solution would be a setting to resolve taxonomy to a particular level. Species, genus, or family are the relevant levels for most people and taxon groups. A better solution would be to permit the user to manually collapse nodes or ranks, e.g. showing only orders and genera, though I don’t know how difficult that would be to implement.
