Project summary statistics: stats summary wrong for collection projects

[tonyrebelo]

Platform (Website):
Browser, not relevant

The statistics page for collections projects does not properly summarize the data.
So for trad projects it works (e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/habitats-s-afr/stats) but for collections projects it does not provide a reasonable summary (e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/bees-of-south-and-southern-africa/stats)
This delivers:

Which is clearly wrong as there are 12,933 observations in the project.

Is there any chance that this can be restored? It seems counterproductive to download all 12,933 observations just to create a pivot table with observations per year+month. and to do so every month.

I dont suppose it might be possible to have it presented as a graph (like so - as is done on the taxon page?) on the statistics page (~?tab=stats)?

Ta
Tony

[pisum]

@tonyrebelo

for collections projects it does not provide a reasonable summary

@tonyrebelo

Is there any chance that this can be restored?

is this even supposed to work for collection projects? i don’t see any actual links on collection project pages that would take you to such a page. (just because the system does something if you type in a particular URL doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s intended to work.)

@tonyrebelo

It seems counterproductive to download all 12,933 observations just to create a pivot table with observations per year+month. and to do so every month.

the API does provide this information. for example: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/histogram?project_id=bees-of-south-and-southern-africa&interval=month&date_field=created (you can change the parameters in the URL to get the information you’re most interested in…)

here’s a page that will get and present that information as a bar chart and table: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?project_id=bees-of-south-and-southern-africa&interval=month&date_field=created.

or you can work with the data in whatever tool you prefer.

• here’s an explanation of how to work with this kind of data in Excel: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/using-excel-api/22378#step-5-optional-column-chart-of-observations-by-day
• here’s an example of an R script to work with that sort data: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/1m-observations-this-month/2582/4
• you can search for the forum for more examples: https://forum.inaturalist.org/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.inaturalist.org%2Fv1%2Fobservations%2Fhistogram

[tiwane]

@pisum

is this even supposed to work for collection projects?

To my knowledge it’s not designed to work for collection projects, so it’s not a bug.

[tonyrebelo]

Thanks, the histogram api option is great. (And the date created rather than observed is what I really wanted)

Except that given that the functionality exists (on the taxon page), might it not be useful to include the histogram on the stats tab too?
Would I be wasting my time suggesting this as a new feature?

[pisum]

@tonyrebelo

Would I be wasting my time suggesting this as a new feature?

you never know, but i would guess that even there was some interest from others in this sort of feature, it would not be implemented anytime soon.

i just remembered that sort of within the system already, there is the Experimental Compare tool, which can also help you graph the histogram data: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/compare. you’ll notice that the URL changes with whatever configurations you make on that page, and once you have the configuration you like, you can save that URL and add it as a link on your project page. that might be the best you’ll get for a while.