Sort the Species Tab by Higher Level Taxa

[mws]

Currently, the species tab always displays at the lowest possible taxon. I think the ability to sort this to higher taxa should be added. What if I want to see how many observations I have in each family? Currently, iNaturalist has no built in way to do that.

As an example, say I’ve got If I’ve got one observation of Icteridae, 2 observations of Quiscalus, 3 observations of Icterus, and 6 observations each of Common Grackle, Brown-Headed Cowbird, Orchard Oriole, and Baltimore Oriole. Currently, the species tab would tell me that I have 6 of each species, ignoring the obsevations at genus and family. However, if I set the high and low rank to “family”, it will tell me that I have 1 observation if Icteridae, ignoring the observations at genus and species.

My proposed feature would present all obserations as the sorted taxon level. If I were to sort by genus, I would have 8 observations of Quiscalus, 15 of Icterus, and 6 of Molothrus. If I sorted by family, I would have 30 observations of Icteridae.

I would also like it so that we can display how many species we’ve seen within a higher taxon. If we had it set to “sort by family, display observations”, we would have 30 observations of Icteridae. If we had it set to “sort by family, display species”, it would display 4 species of Icteridae. This could also possibly work for any taxon level, so we could sort by family and display genus to get 3 genera of Icteridae.

I think this would be a unique and useful way to view observations.

[wildlandblogger]

I would like to be able to see species as grouped by higher level taxon, also. I highly agree with this suggestion.

[masonmaron]

This would be cool. Much easier and more neatly compiled than having to do each individual group in the species search bar and create a separate list somewhere.

[tiwane]

I’ll add this to the wishlist for the Explore page redesign, because something like this won’t happen until it’s rewritten from the ground up. Feel free to vote for it if you want, but it’s already on the radar so you can also vote for something else.

[bouteloua]

I think this might be a duplicate of this existing request. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/implement-taxonomic-view-for-observations-search-page/244

[mws]

That’s not really the same suggestion as this. That one seems to be asking for the ability to organize observations into a tree, whereas this one is asking for the “species” tab to work exactly as it does already, but for taxa other than species.

[bouteloua]

Ah, okay, was having a hard time picturing how this would appear, other than a tree, when one has not selected any ranks in the filters. But you only want it to display differently if certain ranks are selected?

[mws]

Here’s my shoddy attempt at what a “Sort by family, display observations” explore screen would look like. It groups the observations into their families, but the text at the bottom says how many observations of each family there are.

[mws]

This one would be “Sort by family, display genera”. It groups observations into their families, and tells you how many genera of each family has been observed.

[amascola]

By allowing one to sort by higher level taxa rather than observation frequency or date it would allow the user to have a constantly updated field guide of a given area. This seems very useful.

[lindsiodendron]

Sorry if I’m breaking forum etiquette here by replying to a very old topic, I’m pretty new here.

Have there been any updates on this feature request? It’d be super useful, and I wasn’t sure if this had been implemented yet.