Currently if you leave the taxon blank, under Species you will get things like Genus and Subgenus, so it is an accurate summary of the Observations items.
e.g. Do a browser find for “genus” in https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_user_id=meteorquake&place_id=189794&quality_grade=needs_id&view=species
But if you fill the taxon in, you only get species, so effectively it omits results from the Observations.
e.g. There is no genus or subgenus in : https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_user_id=meteorquake&place_id=189794&quality_grade=needs_id&taxon_id=51821&view=species
but switch to the Observations tab and there are.
This is inconsistent behaviour, and I think must be a bug in that the first indicates the intention not to omit observations from the summary.
The impact of this is quite considerable because it means if you are trying to ID or find things you miss out results unless you start running filters for separate levels.
W10(64) Firefox beta 119.0 Desktop
I don’t understand the problem here. If there are species the species are shown, if there are not species the genus is shown. If there are species in a genus there is no reason to show the genus separately in addition…
To clarify… if you have 2 observations -
Euphorbia genus
Euphorbia maculata
A geographic search will show both items under the species tab, but adding Euphorbiaceae or Euphorbia it will only show Euphorbia maculata.
This is at best inconsistent but in terms of practicality the former is helpful but the latter unhelpful.
Maybe I’m missing it but in the two examples you give above, Genus Euphorbia is present in neither (because there are species), but Genus Acalypha is present in both (because there are no species). This seems consistent.
From what I can see, Matthew is right. More about how iNaturalist counts and displays taxa here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/how_inaturalist_counts_taxa
Can you link to examples of this occurring? Only E. maculata should show on the species tab in either example.
To note a potential source of confusion, there is a difference between Euphorbia the genus and Euphorbia the subgenus.
Are you sure the “Euphorbia genus” observation is not actually IDed to the subgenus level? If so, then both Euphorbia (subgenus) and Euphorbia maculata would show up in the species tab; E. maculata is in the subgenus Chamaesyce.
That being said, it still doesn’t explain this:
As long as you aren’t changing the parameters to include more (or fewer) observations than the original geographic search, the subgenus shouldn’t disappear.
The examples given in the initial post are good ones to try.
So this one (species tab) has genus items (do a find for the word Genus) -
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_user_id=meteorquake&place_id=189794&quality_grade=needs_id&view=species
But now fill e.g. Euphorbiaceae
and you’ll see there are no genus items and a quick count of the observation tallies indicates 20 observations summarised.
But click on the Observation tab and you’ll see 35 observations (including lower levels than species).
So without the taxon entered you’re getting Genus items.
Now I think about it they are probably the end points where there are no lower levels but at the end of the day it’s a muddle, showing Genus items sometimes but not at others. Given those Genus items do appear when they do, it would make sense for the Species tab to be a true summary of the Observations tab, so Observations that are just at Genus etc level should appear on it and not be appearing or not appearing depending on what other observations there happen to be…
But click through any of those genus examples to view their observations and you’ll see all the observations are at rank genus, not below.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_user_id=meteorquake&place_id=189794&quality_grade=needs_id&taxon_id=47341
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_user_id=meteorquake&place_id=189794&quality_grade=needs_id&taxon_id=68931
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_user_id=meteorquake&place_id=189794&quality_grade=needs_id&taxon_id=47343
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?not_user_id=meteorquake&place_id=189794&quality_grade=needs_id&taxon_id=325442
That’s been floated at the discussion about redesigning Explore.
I would be fine if this was added as an option, but I much prefer to have only the leaves displayed in the species tab.
I’m definitely all for options :)
There’s a tendency for websites to provide only a few settings but it would be good if popular functional websites (such as iNaturalist) provided a no-frills advanced option system full of many settings. It doesn’t make coding harder but allows users to customise everything…