First I want to thank all involved with iNaturalist as a whole. It serves many valuable purposes. One of those is what I keep describing as probably an exponential increase in geographic distribution information of organisms that would have otherwise been unknown. Since joining iNaturalist I have…

Since iNat doesn’t contain outside data (much of which isn’t even digitized for some groups of taxa), it’s not really possible for it to automatically identify new distribution records. There is an existing feature though the place checklists, which records the first time an observation was recorded…

As @bouteloua said, it can be difficult to ascertain if an iNat record is really a new county or state record unless there is a published reference that maps currently known records from various sources or a taxonomic or regional expert who knows all those records. I’ve encountered a number of such …

Thanks @bouteloua for your comments. I wasn’t really trying to suggest that iNat should be able to determine automatically that an observation is a new distribution record but more so that if a user could check a box that indicated that it was in order to provide the iNat number crunchers something…

Thanks for the clarification! I will move your topic back to #feature-requests . That said since it would require a lot of oversight and expertise, I’m not sure it’s something that the team would be likely to implement. Would be really cool though!

I wonder if I could create a project for observations that are verified distribution records. Obviously it wouldn’t capture them all as folks wouldn’t know about it unless it was advertised but it might be a cool project to have on iNat housing only verified distribution records. Thoughts?

Can’t say I’m keen on the concept. Because I live in arid grasslands where annual rainfall fluctuates wildly, and everything is tied to rainfall one way or another. Thus, species ranges are NOT fixed. They interdepend, and they respond. Not just to weather but also to intrusions by humans or by inva…

I think I see your point but I don’t think it applies to what I am proposing. I agree that in most cases a species range is not fixed by human geographic boundaries. But tracking species distribution using human made geographic boundaries is a widely used tool for determining the status of a speci…

I think it’s important to document new distribution records and would support a project on iNat that highlights those records that represent new and significant location records. The information can be valuable for tracking changes in distribution or just filling in holes on range maps to better re…

[image] aggie_wildlifer: I wonder if I could create a project for observations that are verified distribution records. Obviously it wouldn’t capture them all as folks wouldn’t know about it unless it was advertised but it might be a cool project to have on iNat housing only verified distribution…

Cool. Thanks for sharing that story Tony. I really enjoyed reading the post. The good news is that even if there isn’t a feature or a project to track all these new records they are still happening.

Mark observations as new distribution records

Feature Requests

Topic		Replies	Views
Duplicate County Records General question	14	1014	November 7, 2022
Sorting observations to highlight observations that represent the largest range expansions for a taxon Feature Requests	6	579	July 18, 2021
Your iNaturalist highlight stories! General question	48	3069	June 21, 2023
Papers about iNat and range maps? General	4	573	May 17, 2023
Using iNaturalist observations in an original published work General question	1	405	December 16, 2023

Mark observations as new distribution records

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