Hi, is there a way to search placeholder names? Thanks!

Thanks Andre, it looks like what we need is “species_guess”…

[image] kiwifergus: species_guess Yay! I was asking about searching for placeholdered items earlier, and this looks like a clue. So, what would be the format to put that into a working Identify url? If it goes like this example https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?per_page=100&i…

I think the links Andre supplied are what you would use to see obs that have no ID, and therefore the placeholder would be “visible” as the ID on the observation.

Sorry Lisa, I can’t seem to get the &species_guess= url hack to work. @bouteloua might know how to achieve this?

Not one I know off hand, sorry! I suspect it may require use of the API.

OK, a little experimentation with this yields some bad news… I put up an observation and gave it an ID of “Quercus roburt” (deliberate mis-spelling to make it an obvious placeholder) .json shows the species_guess as “Quercus roburt” I add an ID of Quercus robur (valid taxa ID) and it shows the bi…

Thank you. @kiwifergus , that is exactly what I was trying to articulate (badly!). I’m a bit of a technophobe so I find some of the responses challenging, but I’ll give it my best shot! Thank you all!

One comment, it may still be available. And i don’t know the answer to the this. Keep in mind the json is nothing more than the data values returned by the api call. It may be possible that the data is still in the database but simply not retrieved by the api call.

True. I have only ever heard of the placeholder text being stored in “species_guess”, and after this experimentation I remembered a comment from someone about them being overwritten and lost. I certainly do hope they are preserved somewhere! @tiwane @kueda might comment on the availability of the p…

This is my question. I often go through big batches of unidentified observations to try to at least ID them to a group that experts will look for (say lizard, hummingbird, etc). Sometimes I come across species placeholders and I don’t know what to do. I’m not an expert so I can’t actually make the i…

Searching ‘Placeholders’

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Searching ‘Placeholders’

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