Is there a possibility for inaturalists to search for a group of birds and photos where they eat their food plants?
More precisely I search for food plants of parrots across all species. For example all parrot species that eat species from the plant genus Malus. Malus is a good example, because apples are widely used as useful and ornamental trees. From such pairs: Food plant - parrot species I would like to use for statistical analyses.
there’s not a great way to look for interactions in iNaturalist in bulk, unless the relevant observations with interactions have observation fields associated with them. (unfortunately, the use of observation fields is uncommon, and they aren’t always consistently applied.)
for an example of a query that includes a filter on an observation field, this would give you parrots eating sea almonds: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=18874&verifiable=any&field:Eating=62821
and this would give you parrots eating anything:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=18874&verifiable=any&field:Eating
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59614664
I gave an old iPhone video of the parrots devouring the fruit tree flowers. The pics are screen shots from the video.
You could do it the tedious way: go through all parrot pictures and pick out the ones that are eating.
GloBI (Global Biotic Interactions) attempts to aggregate interactions data from many sources. so that may provide a larger set of data for this kind of thing. see https://www.globalbioticinteractions.org/?interactionType=eats&sourceTaxon=Psittacidae&targetTaxon=Plantae.
A relevant project, currently Australia-focused, but with plans to expand:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/hungry-parrots-project
that Australian parrot project uses Feeding on instead of Eating as the key observation field. so this would find observations in that project, along with other observations that use Feeding on instead of Eating:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=18874&verifiable=any&field:Feeding%20on
Here’s a project for observations of things that birds are eating: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/bird-food
Thank you very much for the good advice, which I will take a closer look at. So far I have searched through the literature and found about 7000 entries that combine a food plant with a parrot species and an eaten plant part.
But there should be a way to include the partly great observations and photos. Partly they show more than simply the simple allocation like fruit, plant name, parrot name.
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