I would like to suggest a small but very useful improvement to iNaturalist: allow users to search for an observation simply by entering its observation ID in the main search bar.
Description of need:
Each observation already has a unique numerical ID, but searching for that number in the regular search interface does not seem to directly retrieve the corresponding observation. At the moment, users generally need to access the observation through its URL or use more specific search methods.
A direct ID search would be especially useful for scientific research and data citation. For example, if an observation is cited in a scientific paper, the author could provide its iNaturalist observation ID, and other researchers could quickly enter that ID into iNaturalist and retrieve the exact record, including its photographs, identification, date, location, and other associated data.
This would make individual observations much easier to verify, cite, and track in scientific publications, without requiring users to create a separate bibliographic reference for every observation.
Feature request details:
Ideally, entering something like 123456789 into the search bar would return the corresponding observation directly.
It seems like a relatively simple feature that could significantly improve the usability of iNaturalist for researchers and anyone working with large numbers of observations.