Original title: Did something change to ‘Unknown’ overnight? Original thread: ▶ Summary I have changed the name of the thread and hidden the original post, as I realized I had made an error this morning. However, I still stand by the following. I think that there should be more iconic taxa/categori…

Feature requests here, both under review: Make crustaceans and myriapods iconic taxa Create iconic taxa for bacteria, archaea, and viruses and Split Plantae into several iconic taxa (this one was declined).

I thought I would have a look at what the Explore tab would look like if I exclude all current iconic taxa; Birds all the way through to Protozoa. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?view=species&without_taxon_id=47158,3,26036,20978,40151,47178,47115,47119,47126,47170,47686 The top species id…

First we want to split plants. Red and green algae. Moss and assorted little worts. Ferns. Conifers. Flowers. Cannot expect iNatters to sort out pumpkins from potatoes IsALLPlants. We could start with Flowers and Not Flowers. (The mind boggles)

When I want to look at just Unknowns, without Bacteria, Protozoa, etc., I add &identified=false to the URL. For example, here’s all “true” Unknowns world-wide: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?iconic_taxa=unknown&identified=false&place_id=any&quality_grade=needs_id I hope this helps!

[image] martyndrabik: Overnight, toggling ‘Unknown’ has expanded my Identify parameters to over 200 pages, with 99% of these being unidentified slime molds. can you provide a screenshot of this, including the URL that shows up at the top of the browser? it sounds like you just didn’t have Un…

Haha, scratch that. I just checked my History, and I must have mis-clicked and selected Protozoa instead of Unknown. Oh dear, oh dear… I stand by the need for more iconic taxa though. Thanks for those that contributed to that part of the discussion.

there are 14 iconic taxa, or 13 if you exclude “unknown”. it doesn’t look like you have excluded all of these. particularly, “other animals” includes most of the taxa that you noted. I meant these categories, of which there are 12. [{4D76B81A-64A3-4B2C-BF8D-6C898A82A51E}] @mods Feel free to lo…

there are 14 iconic taxa. see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-additional-taxa-category-buttons-in-the-filter-menu-to-include-taxa-not-in-any-other-category/63293/2 .

Oh, thanks. How do I get to that page to see those?

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/martyndrabik

Oh, obviously. Thanks again. Ah, so the two missing from the Filter Categories are ‘Kelp, Diatoms and Allies’ and ‘Other Animals’. Is there any way to search ‘Other Animals’ using the Explore tab?

Need for more Filter Categories

General

upupa-epops January 9, 2026, 2:38pm 5

Feature requests here, both under review:

Make crustaceans and myriapods iconic taxa
Create iconic taxa for bacteria, archaea, and viruses

and Split Plantae into several iconic taxa (this one was declined).

3 Likes

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Add additional taxa category buttons in the filter menu to include taxa not in any other category Feature Requests	3	204	March 26, 2025
Filter for species that don't belong in any of the existing category filters? General question	14	846	August 10, 2023
Non-iconic taxa appear under unidentified/unknown observations Bug Reports	3	1450	February 9, 2020
Observation count appears to be off by 17 General	4	137	May 22, 2025
Identifying taxa just to remove them from "unknown" General	43	3090	December 26, 2022

Need for more Filter Categories

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