Number of species greater than number of observation

Bug Reports
1

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Platform : Android

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser : Chrome

**URLs **: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=125501&view=observers

Description of problem : top observer species count (21) is more than observation count (19)

Screenshot_20241228_065649_Chrome
Screenshot_20241228_065649_Chrome1573×895 113 KB

2

Hello, I’m not sure why it says 19 observations because when you filter the search to the observer in question, you can see there are actually 24: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=125501&user_id=raylei

1 Like
3

Here are their 21 sp (across 24 obs)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=125501&user_id=raylei&view=species

Also one with disagreement at Genus

4

We took a look and this is due to the fact that Elasticsearch, which is what we use for searches, will give approximate results for some complicated searches, which the counts for the Observers tab can suffer from.

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5

So this is considered a known bug ?

6

it seems like it should be interpreted as the intentional sacrifice of a tiny bit of accuracy for a big gain in performance. is there any real world use case where not having 100% accuracy in this kind of case is a serious issue?

1 Like
7

It’s just inherent to Elasticsearch. But yes, it’s a known issue that is documented by Elasticsearch.

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