Searching "Observations with this field and value" for fields that use a Taxon as the datatype should show children taxa

[brnhn]

I’ll just copy my use case here from another thread:

@brnhn

The taxon_id parameter will include all matches, for example taxon_id=47125 (angiosperms) returns all matching observations of any angiosperm regardless of child taxon (pin oak, yes!):

• https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=47125

But using the field:Host=47125 parameter only returns observations with the observation field Host: Angiospermae, but not any child taxon (pin oak, nope):

• https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?field:Host=47125

Is there anything I can do to make the field:Host parameter inclusive of matches for any taxon that belongs to the searched taxon? Like taxon_id does?

I use this parameter to make IDs in a project and often I need to be less specific than the parameter allows. For example today I had to run 15 or so individual queries just to see if there were any more matches on different species in the genus Solanum.

To be more specific, my current process to check a genus of plants in some area for parasite identification is:

1. Go to a genus
2. filter by location
3. click view all observations
4. click the N Species tab (in this case 32)
5. click into the taxon page
6. copy the taxon id
7. open this link and paste the ID: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&field:Host=XXX
8. checkout the results
9. back to step 5 for each species present in the area.

It’s fairly tedious when functionality like with the taxon_id parameter already does what I’m looking for in a few steps. Maybe there’s a better way but I haven’t found it yet.

For observations fields that accept taxon parameters it seems much less useful for them to work in a different way than the nested child/parent taxon system the rest of the UI uses.