Following up on this post about 50% of all vertebrates documented on iNat. Is there a way to pull up a list of species in a particular taxonomic group that have yet to be documented? Perhaps by country or state as well as globally?
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With well curated checklists for places, there is a filter for unobserved species.
However, it requires well curated checklists, something not enough effort has gone into.
One caveat: that URL will show taxa as undocumented if all their observations have withheld coordinates (i.e. private).
For clarity, that’s intentional, not a bug, to prevent people creating places, enabling checklists and then reverse engineering where those records are located by manipulating the boundaries of the place.
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Very bird-biased. It was even mentioned in the comments – that most iNat users are birders. It also looks like we need to get cracking on the fungi, if we are not even at 1% yet.
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I dont think it is that the inat user base is birder biased. Twice as many users have added an insect observation as have added a bird. Three times as many for plants.
I think it is more that birds as a group are both relatively small in number, with only about 10000 species versus much larger other, in particular invert groups, and generally easy to identify.
If anything in my experience it is harder to get birders using the site than generalists or folks centred on a different group as inevitably the answer is they see no reason to switch from eBird.
Ah, but a good number of the plant observations (in my experience) aren’t focused on highlighting biodiversity. People want their plant, often a landscaping plant, identified. This is not wrong and I hope it connects them with nature.
With observers that focus on other kingdoms it seems to me at least that there is more a focus on “catching them all”.
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At the moment there are 10,329 RG fungal species recorded on iNat. That is about 7% of the 148,000 currently described species. The number of described species is about 5% of the estimated total.
I think 7% (not 1%) is quite good and I’d be surprised to ever see the percentage getting significantly higher - and may even go down. The majority of described (and undescribed) fungal species cannot be identified from macro-photographs and few observers have the equipment and information to do much more.
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Tons of fish missing too, even ones with North American ranges like Copper Redhorse and Bering Cisco. iNat just got its first Bloater (Coregonus hoyi) record 4 months ago – and they’re present in all of the Great Lakes!
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