Hello! I’m looking to find a record of any insect that visits my plant of interest. Is there a way to search for this? So far I’ve tried filtering using the observation field but that only pulls up my observations. I know not everyone uses the observation fields, but thought it was a good place to start. For context I’m trying to see all observations of insects tagged as visiting Helianthus maximiliani. Thank you!
Welcome to the iNat Forum!
You posted this in the Tutorials category, which was an accident, right?
Sure was, thanks!
I don’t think you mentioned in which field you are looking for this information. Unfortunately, there are multiple fields that folks might use to record this kind of interaction, and new ones are being defined all the time. There’s no standardized field for this info. It’s essentially a free-for-all.
For example, in our project, we chose to use “Nectar Plant” in Butterfly observations to record plants being visited for nectar, because that’s the kind of interaction that folks often want to document. There were several other alternatives we could have used, but that one seemed to be used more often in Butterfly observations than the others I checked. I figured there was no sense in re-inventing the wheel, I should go with the flow, and several other trite sayings I can’t recall.
But other projects came along and defined their own project-specific fields to record essentially the same thing (basically raising a middle finger to the rest of the iNat community). I could have started to grab data from these newly defined fields, on top of the one we were already using, but I’m not big on chasing moving targets. Instead, I opted to get even.
If you’re using the API, there may be a way to bring up all insect records within the scope of your search, and then search all fields in each record for the string "Helianthus maximiliani".
You can then check which observation field contains that value, and decide if it looks like the field is recording the kind of visitation event you’re looking for. Yes, I know that’s a backwards way of doing this (welcome to iNat!).
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable will have a better suggestion but that’s the best I have.