I am interested in rare plants of Wisconsin. There is currently a project called “Rare Plants of Wisconsin”, but it is only for research-grade observations. I’m realizing there there are many plants that are also rare species that just haven’t been confirmed yet. I would like to help confirm these, but I need a way to find them all. I have a list of all the endangered/threatened/special concerns plants, but I have to manually enter them into the project guidance individually. This takes a surprising long time to copy and paste the scientific names. Also, after a couple hours of doing this, I decided to save my progress halfway and my project did not save and crashed.
Is there a way to enter in species criteria faster than manually entering in each species?
It isn’t immediately clear to me what you’re trying to do - can you clarify?
Are you trying to find observations to ID (so that they will enter the project once they are research grade)?
Or are you trying to edit the settings of a project? If this option, can you link to the project? Can you clarify what the “project guidance” is? Is this just documentation for the project, or the actual inclusion criteria?
If you can find a list of them (if need be, edit in word processor), try pasting in the whole list. It might need to be comma-separated or on separate lines.
Also there’s a “Duplicate project” option for projects. You could maybe duplicate the existing one and edit it with new name and new criteria. (I haven’t tried this either.)
Sorry, I am trying to create a project that only allows rare plants of Wisconsin as the criteria. There is currently one that does this, but it is only at the research-grade level. I want one that allows non-research grade observations so I can help identify them. Does this make more sense?
That helps - are you trying to create a traditional or collection project? I think collection project is probably the better option here, but the interfaces are a little different.
Your best bet might be to contact an admin on the project you are interested in, see if they will duplicate for you, change the title, and then make you an admin on the new project so you can alter it as you want.
I’ve run into this problem before also. In my experience, the only way (other than project duplication) to enter a list of species to include in a project is to type (or paste) them in one at a time. I believe the same problem arises when you want to make a list of observers to include, they have to be entered individually, not as a list.
But, if what you want to do is find the non-research grade rare plants of Wisconsin to ID them, I don’t think you need a project for that at all. You can paste a list of taxon numbers into the url for an identify search, set the place, and it should give you a list of plants of those taxa within Wisconsin that need ID.
For example, if I want to identify all non-research-grade observations of the taxa on my personal list of favorite taxa (everyone has their own such list as part of their profile), I just need to use
This is what a Collection Project would do if such projects were list-enabled, which they currently are not unfortunately.
You can create your own list from a CSV file at https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/new, then use the Add Batch option after the empty list is created. There may be some cross-walking to do between iNat taxonomy and some of the names you supply in the CSV before finalizing the list.