Hi there,
I’m doing some research into habitat use and and environmental niches and I’ve found some really helpful observations where the observer has written notes on where the organism was found, moisture levels, substrate, other species co-currently observed etc. It got me wondering if there is a way to bring up all observations in an area that have a note attached but so far I haven’t found anything - is there a way?
Thanks in advance!
I meant this section that appears under the photo and above the IDs. I did try putting a few generic key words in the box you’ve indicated but the results it pulled up that I checked did not have notes so must have been the tags.
for regular folks, there’s not an efficient way to do this. you’d basically have to get all observations in your area of interest and then apply your own secondary filtering to find only the observations in that set that have notes/descriptions.
I’m willing to spend some time learning to do this, do you know where I might find some resources that explain the process? Would be quicker than now where I’m manually looking through!
can you describe in detail one or two cases of what you’re trying to get?
there are a lot of different ways to approach the problem, but the best way to get this information depends on what exactly you’re trying to get.
I’m ground-truthing a habitat model for Belize so I want to ensure what the model says the habitat type will be is correct. I’m looking for any observations in Belize that describe the habitat where the organism was found i.e on the edge of a caye, in understory of secondary forest, in a ditch on the edge of a plantation etc.
do you already know that people could capture this information in places other than just the notes? there are observation fields and tags and maybe even comments that people could use to capture that information, too. are you purposely limiting your scope here to just the notes?
are you limiting your analysis only by country? or are you filtering by other conditions like quality grade (ex. research grade only?), taxon (ex. plants only?), or anything else? (i’m trying to understand how big your set of data is.)
No I am interested in data that could come from tags and comments also but longer format sentences are typically going to be more useful to me. The data set is very large as whether an observation is research grade / the taxa is unimportant as I’m trying to build a picture of the country. The only thing that matters is that the metadata is correct and I am only looking at data from 2017 - present.
ok. currently, there are ~170000 observations in the country. that falls within the limit of 200000 observations that can be retrieved via the standard CSV export but above the ~10000 limit within which it’s typically efficient to get data via the API.
so if you’re working with the CSV export, you would just need to make sure your export file includes the “description” (aka notes) and “tag_list” (tags) fields when you set up your export. then when you get your results, you would filter or sort by those fields, and eliminate any records that don’t have any information in either. then, you can look at the values in those fields from the remaining records.
getting information in observation fields will probably require you to identify some specific observation fields that include the information you’re looking for. you’ll be able to export values from those fields, if you’ve ever used those specific fields before. so you could set up a temporary dummy observation and add those observation fields of interest to your dummy observation. once done, you’ll have the option to include values from those observations in your observation CSV export.
unfortunately, there’s not an efficient way to parse through comments except via the API, but that’s also the least likely place to contain habitat notes.
Additionally to what pisum said about regular habitat observation fields and keywords, I would like to recommend looking out for numbertags in observations.
I know a few users - and made it my own habit - who link all observations of the same day and place (co-existence) by using one observation ID as a keyword for all.
In this case the keyword would only bring up the two observations.
but I often apply them when observing multiple species together or when I need to link the host plant of any insect ect.
Not sure how common this practice really is but I do see it quite often and really like the approach.
It may be hidden to those who don’t know about it. Worth checking out ;)
What about searching for comments under observations? In addition to the notes included in the observation itself, you can add informations by publishing comments after observations (and identifications), is there a way to search for those?
In my case I wanted to search for my own notes on any observations (i.e. also notes on observations made by other users.)
Also would I get notifications when someone adds another comment later, if I didn’t add an identification but only wrote a comment under someone else’s observation?
The goal is to track any possible update or reply to my questions that I would have missed - but it could also be useful in the case of the OP if he were searching for particular words related to habitats in these comments…
Thank you this is really helpful, will definitely have a go with this and see what turns up!
That is really interesting know, I wasn’t aware people did this, will keep an eye out as I move through the data!
To get all of your own comments:
https://www.inaturalist.org/comments?mine=true
And you do get notifications on others comments when you either add the observation to your favorites or by commenting yourself - which you did.
it’s better to use observation fields (rather than tags) to accomplish this sort of linking.
I started out doing that but switched to the keyword approach because it’s a bit faster. I was so convinced by that one post about the observation field approach but gave up on it pretty fast. It somehow felt tiresome, but it’s been a while, I don’t remember it to well. The keyword thing feels more efficient. It’s a click or 2 less when navigating around. Good enough for linking a leaf mine to a plant
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