What is the best way for me to have iNaturalist compile a list of all taxa I have reported for my yard? Is there a way to draw a polygon around my property that would include sightings within that polygon?
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I recently described how I do it here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/project-place-how-to-survey-a-personal-property/13588/2
A related thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/creating-a-yard-list/10457
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Give your yard polygon a buffer that extends a fair distance outside your yard, because the project won’t count any observation whose uncertainty bubble crosses the border. It may feel sloppy to do this, but unless your neighbors are doing inventories too, the bigger border won’t pick up irrelevant observations.
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There are a few other options which don’t require a place or project. All of these will give you a url which you can bookmark to view the species list. You can add a link to your profile page if you want to be able to find it easily when you’re logged onto iNat too (though that’ll be public). They all have some limitations, but the project approach isn’t perfect either. One of these might be better for you (or someone else reading this)
- Use a bounding box if a rectangular shape will cover your yard. Set up the search you want then go to the map, zoom until you have only the area you want then click “redo search in map area”.
Here’s an example of what it’ll look like (my observation in a small area in a park):
You can click on the species tab to get a list.
- Use the location description then enter that in the “Description / Tags” when searching (like this filter for a nature reserve I visited recently). That relies on you always putting the same location description (though if you add them via the web and use a favourite location when adding the observations this is easy to do):
- Use a tag. Again you need to add the tag to every observation. I’ve done this for photos I’ve taken with my Trail Camera:
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I created a project for a similar purpose, but I didn’t do a location-based one. It seems like locations can be off by a couple of blocks occasionally, so either you have a bigger polygon than you would like and wind up including extra stuff, or you wind up missing stuff. This is just my thinking - I haven’t actually tried it. I also have a extremely small property so I expect this would be less of a problem if it were bigger.
I opted to make a traditional project to track observations in my yard. With this style project, you have to manually add observations to the project, but I like the control and accuracy of it. After all, it’s just myself and my husband and our very small garden, so it’s not really too much trouble. I guess if a stranger stopped by and documented something amazing we would miss it, but chances of that happening are slim.
If you are interested the instructions are in the link of the last paragraph here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/new
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Thank you everyone for all these suggestions. My yard is 50 feet wide by 100 feet deep, and I could certainly draw a rectangle that is a bit bigger than my property. Nobody else is likely to add anything in iNaturalist for my property, and I’m not too concerned about it being public. So I may create a traditional or collection project from my location, then join the group keeping track of backyards.
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I have made a tag for mine.
False Bay garden.
Thanks for showing me how to use the filter.
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If you make a project, you can set it so only your observations show up inside of it. This way, you can make an expanded box, but don’t have to worry about others observations
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Nice tip!
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