I’m using inaturalist to share my European and Japanese records mostly to increase and train my knowledge of Japanese wildlife. I found that ID’-ing other people’s records is a great way to train yourself too.
I’ve been testing the multiple areas-search and my standard query upto now was insect+birds in 4 countries. But then I thought it wise to further zoom in and concentrate on the taxa that i know something about: birds, butterflies and moths and dragonflies.
I came up with an url that should filter those in for Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea and Taiwan (covering my home country, Japan and its closer - and smallest -neighbours)
thanks Jay, i’ve been looking at that label ‘iconic’ but didn’t think it would include plants automatically…
Of course it’s just a small error in my string… Thanks again
No problem. :) “Iconic taxa” means the big groups you can choose by clicking the pictures (icons!) - like birds, fungi, etc. There are only twelve of those, so I guess giving bigger numbers in the list just confuses the system and it loops around and settles on plants.
If you use the Filters on https://www.inaturalist.org/observations, and select some iconic taxa (=“Categories”), you will see in the resulting URL that the parameter used is &iconic_taxa= and it only accepts one or more of the following text labels:
So to search for the iconic taxa Birds and Insects you would include in your URL &iconic_taxa=Aves,Insecta - or just select them in the Filter.
Because you included a URL parameter that was not recognized in this context, the system just ignored it and returned all the observations from the listed places, which added mostly plants, apparently.
Ok, that’s a sound explanation. Jay’s link works a treat, I will use that from now on when I am a bit more adventurous than normal (usually i check mainly dutch and japanese records.