Website
Chrome
Step 1: Follow link provided to Place page “UmPhafa Private Nature Reserve”
Step 2: Go to Species tab
Step 3: Look at No. of confirmed. It will show 72. However, when searching my Research Grade UmPhafa observations on my Dashboard it shows I have well over 160 confirmed species
Please can someone assist me here, I really want the Species tab to show an accurate list of all my Research Grade species for UmPhafa!
Use this for everything: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=130130&subview=grid&view=observers
or this for RG: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=130130&quality_grade=research&subview=grid&view=observers
Appreciated… but my point remains: I want to see this listed accurately on the species tab of the page (in my link). Why is it not all there? Surely this is a bug/ site functionality not working 100%? Hence why I made this Thread
The place page and checklists are some of the oldest parts of the iNat website and rather low priority for the staff to fix. They’re known issues that it can be slow to sync or fail to sync with the observations in that place. Thebeachcomber is just giving you some workarounds.
“Some of the oldest parts” … and still not fixed?
Why is it not a priority?
Yes workarounds are nice, thank you, but I would very much like to see all the hard work I put in to getting all those obs rewarded by having them all shown in the Species tab
That faulty page is the first thing that folks clicking to see obs from a ‘Place’ are shown after all
I can’t speak for the staff as far as the reasons for their priorities, but it is a small, non-profit team providing a free service. Personally I rarely look at the Place pages, instead I use the Explore page to see what observations are found in a place.
The code is open source if you’d like to look at ways to contribute. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/ways-to-help-out-on-inat-wiki/1983
One quirk of the place checklists, especially for small places, is that if any part of an observation’s location buffer (circle in the observation screen, bounding rectangle for obscured observations) lies outside of the boundaries of the place, the observation will not be included in the checklist for that place.
We have a medium sized wildlife refuge in our state with a dozen or so endemic species. They are all obscured because they are rare so none of the endemic species show up in the place checklist for the refuge.
I think this is a precaution to protect rare species observations from someone who simply draws very small places to narrow down the true location of a protected species.
Almost nobody checks for place lists, if you want to see all obs - use place id in the search or create a project as the simplest way.
Yup, it is, my Common Pochards that were seen on the specific lake on the map are everywhere around the city. And Lapwings that were nesting at the field that is for almost 10 years is a group of buildings are still hidden. And who knows how common species become vulnerable all the time.
Just to clarify - iNat doesn’t use the actual place boundary here, but rather the “bounding box”, which is the rectangle (in red below) which inscribes the entire place boundary:
Explained a bit more in depth here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#placeindex
I have also been frustrated with the places functionality lately and have been using the workaround. It is a real shame that this isnt a priority for resoltion because inat places are a great way to communicate the power and value of iNat to the general public. i posted the ‘work around’ link for place i have been doing volunteer ecological restoration in, on a facebook group to share the diversity of species that are in the area. it would have been great to be able to post the elegant original place URLs that were part of the early iNat functionality… eg https://inaturalist.nz/observations?place_id=150841 vs https://inaturalist.nz/places/pareraho-forest - which one would you click on?
So first I was told that Place lists are not a priority for the iNat maintenance team, now you tell me that hardly anyone looks at them. Why not just scrap it all together then? Why include such a half baked feature on iNat to begin with especially since no-one cares for it?? It just astounds me…
I agree with @parkecology that this feature could assist in making iNat even more popular with the general public, particularly the growing number of middle-class park hoppers who may become interested in using iNat to see what creatures can be found in their nearby reserves
In any event, thank you everyone for the assistance. Perhaps part of the problem I’m experiencing lies in what @jdjohnson has described above. I really hope this feature gets the attention it deserves some day
Ideally, I’d like to click on the 2nd link, as that zooms straight onto a delineated map of your ‘place’ and immediately brings up a collage of all the different organisms observed there, complete with tabs and a taxonomic hierarchy to play around with. Unfortunately, much of the fun with this feature is lost if not even half of all the observations for this place are listed
In light of this, I’ll just go with the 1st link (for now)
By the way, welcome to the forums :)
It worked fine in the past. The problem is the technology/approach used proved to not scale adequately as the number of both observations and checklists (between place and personal checklists there are well over 1.5 million checklists trying to be kept in synch) grew.
It is not so much not a site priority, it is, but it is a major task, not a one or two day fix which needs to really be scoped and designed properly with only a couple of developers to tackle it.
There’s no problem for people to find our what lives in those reserves, as there’re tons of projects that use those places, and most places are created for projects specifically. The only good feature there now is full taxonomy list, but it seems it would be better to add this list out of lists on observation page and one of project tabs.
It worked fine before, and as already was stated, the group of developers is not the same as in big corporations and they’re doing their best, if you want to improve something you could help them if you’re knowledgeable in such things, by being angry on those who does their work well doesn’t help nobody. You say it all like someone stole something from you, while it didn’t happen.
I support the request. While I understand too, that the place species list is a bit redundant with the observation interface. I agree that perhaps it should be dropped if it is misleading by being not fully functional.
My instance is this place I created for local county nature preserves:
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/washtenaw-county-napp-nature-preserves
Shows 17 species. Whereas the observations report 580 species:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=162817&view=species
This issue is also for the checklist:
https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/4077385-Washtenaw-County-Nature-Preserves-Check-List
I’m not sure an easy work around to make a similar checklist, thoughts?
It seems the place page lists only include the observations since the place was created, since I created the place a couple weeks ago.
I’ve done web development, so I appreciate the potential to contribute to the code, but unlikely I’d have time in my life now to do so.
The development plan is actually to remove/revamp the way these stats are tallied altogether: “Remove auto-listing functionality and observation stats from place check lists”. More at Scott’s recent post “Upcoming Changes to Lists” (Oct. 27th, 2020).
