I would like to know the best options for finding observations of the least observed plant taxa in a large area, Los Angeles County in California specifically, as a way of determining what may be wild taxa with few observations. This is to help in an assessment of which plant taxa may be rare specifically within the boundaries of Los Angeles County, even though they may be common outside those boundaries. The goal is to check observations of taxa with few observations to correct/verify the IDs and/or to mark as not wild.
It would be nice if there was a way to view something like this on the actual website. This query is problematic in that you can’t sort it to show rarest taxa first and all the rare taxa are cut off due to the limit of how many are shown. I also couldn’t find a way to limit it to taxa with only a certain number of observations. Are there options to do either of these? Does anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks!
There’s no way to do this I don’t think, but the simplest workaround, that seems like it would work perfectly well for your purposes, would be to just do separate searches for smaller taxonomic groups that have less than 500 species with observations. So you could go through all the ferns, then all the conifers, and so on.
You can get place_id by going to a place page and clicking on “Embed Place Widget.” The number in the URL will be the place_id.
You can add &taxon_id=211194&captive=false to get vascular plants that aren’t marked as captive but you will probably still get a lot of unmarked captive/cultivated observations.
The only way I know of is from the explore page. If you click on species tab, they will display in descending order by number of observations. You would then have to scroll to the bottom of the page which may take some time.
If you choose only “research grade”, there would probably be fewer observations.
You could also download and then sort.