Search for bioblitzes by area

Feature Requests
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Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: Website, possibly mobile

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/purtis-creek-bioblitz (example of a bioblitz that’s been entered)

Description of need: A better way to find bioblitzes in a given area

I would propose an easy way to search for bioblitzes in a given area. Currently you can go to the projects section under the Community page, and search for “bioblitz (area name)” and that can work, but you have to already know it’s there, and how the organizers elected to name the bioblitz to reliably find it. I’d like there to be a way to search specifically for bioblitzes within/near a given area (possibly by city or county/province) if the organizers have elected to set up their bioblitz as a project in the community page. I’m not sure if this would work better on the main page or still on the projects page, but I do think it could help increase participation in bioblitzes. Given that iNaturalist’s main goal seems to be encouraging citizen scientist I think that fits within the mission.

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I’m not sure exactly how this would be implemented, but it seems like an interesting idea, and I agree that it meshes well with iNat’s mission. It might be possible to make some type of self-selection process where project creators could self-identify their project as being for a Bioblitz. It would also require some way to do place-based project searches which could be challenging.

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You can already find projects using a particular place, but not projects used by places that are fully included within other places.

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If we had a search by Map option - starting from Bioblitz ?
Or a Location option in the Search box ?

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presumably you would need not just a place search, but a way to determine whether the bioblitiz is upcoming, in progress, or over. that said, it may be worth reading this post: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/can-we-have-a-bioblitz-calendar/454/9.

my thought is that if you’re going to create a way to search for bioblitzes, you need to start with the temporal component as the main thing, and then allow place search as an optional search (because not all bioblitzes incorporate place).

this is probably related to: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/make-collection-and-umbrella-projects-show-up-in-nearby-projects-in-the-app/30268.

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This is an interesting idea but perhaps a question is: are there other ways outside iNat to get this info. In other words if there is why have iNat spend the effort duplicating this kind of function. I have gotten some guidance on bioblitzs from SciStarter. It is American centric but does have listings for all kinds of citizen science projects including those in Canada. A more recent notice I got was from a new Canadian site called ScienceNearMe which again list citizen science projects and bioblitzs but it is new and not well populated. Perhaps striving to encourage people to add to these kinds of sites is an option since they are already set up. Just a thought.

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I would very much like something like this, even just a calendar that is searchable by state/province.

I’m looking to set up a bioblitz in my small town for the local environmental nonprofit, and was wondering if there are any happening soon that we could just piggyback onto. Last year there were 2 gall bioblitzes, one in spring & one in fall, and I’m wondering if a fall one is going to happen again but can’t find anything…

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it occurred to me that you might be able to use other users’ project membership to highlight projects you might be interested in. if you’re interested in a particular taxon, you could use a set of top observers of that taxon for your user set. if you’re interested in a particular location, you could use a set of top observers in that location for your user set. the tricky part is that you need to get user ids as a list of numeric ids. (i would extract them from the results of https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_observers .)

so for example, here are projects ordered by created date (desc) who count one or more of the top 500 observers in Greater Houston as their members (optionally, you could also add &q=blitz or q=bioblitz in the URL parameters if you wanted to see just projects with “blitz” or “bioblitz” in their titles or descriptions): https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_projects?order_by=created&per_page=200&member_id=28364,971468,3704675,16522,4275309,22417,521220,449425,302852,582536,920598,2734410,994527,4049897,779571,455509,453782,553242,1304595,56498,3521755,745129,536964,23757,88020,421102,220689,167458,842791,449471,306974,451250,71826,723646,302101,920561,100576,252899,444541,318400,18812,5229510,206913,147168,152521,346556,922567,978677,1906701,153013,21451,1017779,4365993,2173064,3500555,143239,428585,167406,1593670,1222692,101664,18604,346118,313643,2652309,2705652,211252,268162,167102,72880,423043,989820,325504,325981,850473,292489,812033,417158,323533,430949,1077973,667569,788715,2831424,845209,148447,1670213,1087419,7282900,1149178,48057,459141,323083,6166570,911908,2408443,3902282,68239,306907,435180,3040502,3132892,2748056,1296229,822404,3589,1889860,9706,3474052,246837,1257577,53237,380122,1214168,344767,1138432,1211100,2813097,2757149,24973,253900,1563884,288963,179414,264009,43292,2733681,99899,418449,70563,3281108,82861,233932,452770,567196,160605,176650,2434531,478188,22589,1263767,934393,2452350,1225687,2415888,530786,1106624,65793,2375,333666,900990,6310961,121249,3314770,81815,3437007,1731488,828027,348791,2259298,116865,1354905,3781092,4342780,729506,2748465,832570,3658904,6677706,14327,1085873,451158,232932,2262851,245229,753110,1563532,26160,1127820,49118,453956,470513,3358736,990906,2685797,1724335,453654,227982,1083793,9531,5109302,3124972,3254948,269522,87767,36903,412458,34561,5438886,562855,15221,6390421,440656,277496,759614,644292,3760367,51906,19252,3218184,1765301,4092273,1764906,47929,1889652,32191,454332,427675,876858,2025292,4318936,1569395,5713315,443884,1842614,858350,17777,786948,452410,2076426,359411,2373009,3972553,430818,1293513,4235249,818521,84452,1607823,5598715,140834,284307,3148928,2362156,659672,509822,405452,1408564,176684,912046,17283,84830,1556461,2122836,342358,7453584,6653667,2574664,31761,1903532,433280,447322,522214,6776452,814762,2878385,173763,26296,297282,1888850,3230997,409463,301430,6999053,6345499,3953595,3167825,6110883,23016,2932706,372232,4013228,311187,3712492,238273,4666765,4648433,223936,496331,911287,423366,434713,612717,209251,1035482,788404,36543,2574013,17932,330166,129594,435598,5517181,3147610,10601,2564555,209143,438902,5714395,3038767,3375513,5504,5229919,785047,3539377,2263474,444856,376954,359066,4804556,2790865,2640381,1979727,762643,855562,988565,490990,1544512,3100908,2170051,864861,770498,22654,2281,2033687,670908,1891837,1258585,109783,29641,654376,3658543,1027469,673732,4618912,4305363,1326430,204470,128766,8052531,433959,206492,282503,6690,1592554,1607091,201832,154998,2060300,1233968,1796133,2712810,1146848,324514,2059683,2266376,2242666,919182,5613928,1677377,1585347,3949143,53153,5269405,754435,954782,6531942,6131433,583881,6792980,653134,100874,27881,53283,4967358,16534,1084919,38920,264861,4918278,4519559,1673835,1576433,2833183,1193236,3566279,2613625,1050230,910994,139044,297685,292842,4530368,6679818,761450,52839,3865926,4649305,3825887,18552,795563,118758,447363,1677610,518362,4581791,1533115,1412450,553551,144354,80842,144366,4004174,1634683,3728665,970009,4828599,1637955,302586,4291280,6401810,27047,2628498,1621995,6814600,414244,2184502,7857307,5594084,1897448,2392865,920698,445563,3558290,415818,115116,565596,16101,450903,1590390,3185559,2173122,4052575,1425571,151376,5795114,445623,208028,3640289,1442389,4223231,1667219,590153,12356,4165922,144027,1435602,10285,451916,2405012,446969,444957,71863,15723,3920526,5465229,3955265,5633208,7700271,5658906,5609279,1818224,449871,433127,1358262,734561,454838,794973,396312,1611623,7900323,563128,204762,17392,13595,2745910,4055866,2423444,748417,631851

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