Notify of newly identified species on iNat

Feature Requests
1

It would be great if you could be notified whenever a new species is verified.

I love the Inat Live page, wherein you can see the number of observations increase in real time.

Something like that, where you can see the number of species increase in real time, and each new species appears in a popup window would be cool.

2

For some groups that have a relatively complete list of all the species known to exist included on iNat, there is a Trends tab on the taxon page that includes 'Discoveries", which are the taxa recently identified for the first time: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/40151-Mammalia

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3

a request for the notification part of your idea might best be brought up here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/notifications-on-inaturalist-please-share-your-ideas/374.

4

Awesome! Thank you so much, bouteloua!

5

I’d see this as ideally a filter, similar to “Popular,” which shows the latest species added. I think this would have major benefits beyond just the enjoyment and motivation of seeing the number of species go up. Two key areas:

  1. Users could periodically set to the “New Species” filter, add filters for their location and target taxon, and check to see if matches for their old obs have been added to the database.
  2. New species observed would get more attention from identifiers, hopefully definitively confirming or rejecting those IDs. This would help prevent additional incorrect IDs being based off any first but incorrect examples of a species, forestalling the potential for widespread errors.
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6

I’m not sure we’d make notifications for this, but I’d be interested in a search filter.

1 Like
7

@bouteloua I might be mis-remembering, but I thought there was a way to view these “Discoveries” further back than the green arrow will take you. Like right now mammals only goes back through the six most recently discovered species. Is there maybe an Explore view or something that will do something similar?

8

hmm, the only other way I know of is to use the API for recent_taxa

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9

oh… so this is what that recent_taxa API endpoint powers. it’s all connected in my brain now.

i wonder if the “displaying a list” part of the request here can be satisfied by using the recent_taxa API wrapper (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-find-out-of-range-observations-wiki/4271/2)?

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10

Another feature request that is very similar to this one was accidentally approved a while back: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-feeds-showing-when-new-species-are-added-to-the-database/48405/8

I’m going to adjust this feature request from “Display a list/Notify of newly identified species on iNat” to “Notify of newly identified species on iNat” to focus on the request for the notification aspect. (Although technically, after the date of this feature request, we stopped approving standalone requests for changes to notifications).

2 Likes