Observation Field for Flowers and Pollinators

Please vote for this request and comment there to keep this topic on the agenda!

Another way to do this is through one of the Observation Fields that does the reverse, such as “Interaction: Flower visited by”. Here are all the observations with that field, where the flower visitor is the honeybee Apis mellifera:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&field:Interaction->Flower%20visited%20by=47219

If you change the number 47219 in the above URL for that of another insect species, you will see the plants visited by that species. However, this field is less used than the field identifying the plant in observations of insects, so you won’t see all the information that iNaturalist really has to offer. For example, 4,612 observations of honeybees have the field “Interaction: visited flower of”, but only 224 observations of plants have the field “Interaction: flower visited by” with honeybee as the visitor [in fact, only 184, as 40 of these were observations of honeybees to which the field was erroneously added].

This is why we need a better way to record interactions on iNaturalist, so that an interaction can be recorded between two observations, and remain easily searchable from either taxon.

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