I manage a small iNat Project collating observations in the small town in which I live. After a few years it is time to use this information to create a reference for other people and it would dramatically help me if I could list species in taxonomic sequence. I seem to be able to do it by extracting a csv file and placing it into a personal “list” but it’s a long way around the houses to get there. Is there actually an easy way to do this that anyone has found? It seems to be such a basic tool that everyone would find a use for.
You can open species list for the place you use.
this was a secondary discussion item over at https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/simplified-species-list/25967.
can you share (at least a sample) what your final result is? i’m curious about the different reasons why folks care about “taxonomic sequence”. with species, you would already have species and genus. would you then want to group by family? or are you just going with more of the “iconic taxon” groupings (birds, plants, insects, etc.)? or you really organizing according to the whole taxonomy (in which case, are you just sorting by scientific name at each given rank or doing some other taxonomic ordering)?
UPDATE: there’s also https://kildor.name/inat/species, which can give you the a species list in CSV format. it’s not in taxonomic order, but you could just take the CSV and sort as you like. this and other tools made by @kildor are described here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/several-external-tools-for-inat-data-by-kildor/19906.
To answer your question - I am starting work on an account of the biodiversity of the location and having the species in taxonomic sequence save a lot of needless work in grouping related species together. For example in preparing an overview of the Asters, of Woodpeckers etc. by bringing them together. Before starting to use iNat a few years ago I came from eBird where taxonomic sequence is always the default way of ordering lists. I have never seen the point of alphabetic lists.
1 Like
ok. i see. iNaturalist has no mechanism for defining a true taxonomic sequence / sort. the best it can manage is sort of a pseudo-taxonomic sequence, which is based on taxon ancestry but sorts sibling taxa at any given rank based only on name or id. so if you’re going to try to sort the way eBird does it, you would need your own source list of taxa that defines the taxonomic sequence of these taxa. then you could take your list of species from iNaturalist, lookup the taxonomic ancestry and sorting from your list, and then sort accordingly. alternatively (vice versa), you could start with your source list and then look up which have data from iNat.
Thanks - I thought that might be the case but was hoping there would be some means to do it buried somewhere that I had overlooked. It’s strange, I wonder how other people sort their lists of observations? Alphabetic doesn’t really make much sense.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.