Searching for the genus Comostola in Northern Territory, Australia, produces 50 observations. But 23 of these observations are only to genus as they belong to an as yet undescribed species ANIC1 BOLD:AAD8677. Each of the 23 observations has ANIC1 somewhere in a comment, tag or note. If I add a filter under Description/Tags for ANIC1 it does not find the ones where the ANIC1 is in a comment. How can I search so as to find the obervations with ANIC1 in a comment? Can I add something to the observation that makes it possible to search?
Can you give an example of a search URL that does not work?
while you can search within comments (ex.https://www.inaturalist.org/comments?Search&q=ANIC1), there’s not a great way to filter observations by comments.
to do the sort of observation filtering you’re describing, you’d probably probably have to filter for your genus and place on the server side, and then once you get the set of 50, you’d have to filter on the client side.
the client-side filtering could be done via script (ex. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/search-by-tags-not-present-not-contain/49011/2), but in this particular case, since the big set has only 50 observations, i’d probably get your observations using https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_print_friendly_obs (place id=9994, taxon id=52011), and since the page can display comments, descriptions, and tags, you can just do a find on page using your browser, like so:
if you want to keep these together for future reference, i would probably add them to a traditional project or add a common observation field to all of them, which would be easier to filter for. (the only problem here is that some observers limit who can add projects or fields to their observations.)
or you could also just keep a bookmark url by id. for example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?id=39832611,40116850,40168699. the drawback to this approach is that it’s harder to share this with others, though you could keep the url in, say, a journal post for others to reference, if they need to.
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https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=9994&q=ANIC1&taxon_id=52011 produces only 3 results whereas there are 26 (not 23 as I first stated, my mistake), the remainder only marked in a comment.
Thanks. I think the common observation field is the best way for me.
for what it’s worth, using a project gives you the option of filtering based on not_in_project and other project functionality, while using an observation field makes it easier to record and filter for different variations (ex. type 1, type 2, etc.)
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