Not sure how the technical side of things would work, but it’d be neat if you could select multiple areas at once, especially when identifying things. I could see this having a use when there is a case of out of range organisms being wrongly identified, and the identifier only needs a couple jurisdictions. I know you could go in and go through each place individually, however that could be time consuming, especially if the observations are over a large area.
For example, when specifying the location on the “Identify” page, you would be able to chose say Ontario, Ohio, and Quebec all at once. Perhaps there could be something like an “add location” box?
Since you can already modify the URLs directly to search more than one place at a time (see this tutorial), I modified the feature request title to specify the addition of this to the user interface filters sections.
Pretty much everything in that URL tutorial would be great to have available through the standard filters, but I don’t know how much of a priority that would be for staff, or how much it would blow up the filter dialogs. I would certainly support it if feasible.
It’s something we’re looking into, but the current Explore page is in need of a rewrite as it was written in older code not used by the rest of the site. So it’s likely any major changes to it will have to wait until it’s rewritten.
On Identify would be good too tho. I made this aggregate place a long time ago to facilitate identifying organisms in my region before I knew you could string together multiple place IDs in the URL:
This specific feature request came up in a conversation today. To add to the example @birds_bugs_botany brought up (which I find very valuable for quality control), another common use case is the following: I might be comfortable ID’ing species in a range that’s larger than a single US state but smaller than the US as a whole. Or maybe I am comfortable ID’ing bird species of the Western US and Southern Europe, but I am too lazy/don’t have time to go through the two feeds separately. Right now, there’s no way of restricting the Identify feed to a set of states and I feel this increases the possibility of errors and doesn’t allow iNat to tap the more distributed regional expertise of many of its contributors. Has there been any progress on implementing this as part of the planned Explore page redesign?
We’re still working on Notifications, subscriptions lists, and the like and haven’t turned to Explore. Unfortunately notifications are really complicated and progress has been slow. When we have the bandwidth to start working on Explore, we will.
Right now there are two workarounds:
edit and bookmark a URL that does this for you
create a collection project and bookmark its Identify URL
I’m going to close this because I’m sure we’ll be discussing (and hopefully implementing) multi-value filtering when Explore is redone.