Species that are exclusively found in 1 area

General
1

I want to create a project which shows species that have been recorded in a specific area that have been solely recorded in that area in the UK.

For example

This is my area https://uk.inaturalist.org/projects/breckland-nature

I want to create a new project that shows species that have been recorded in Breckland, and nowhere else in the UK.

Is this possible?
Thanks :)

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2

Yes, you can make a project for species only found in your area. When a species is only found in one place in the world, thatā€™s called being endemic to that area. I think what you would do is create a list of endemic species and then restrict your project to only those species. I believe thatā€™s what the creators of this project have done: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/texas-endemic-species

Hope this helps.

3 Likes
3

The UK as a whole doesnā€™t have many endemic species, i think the subject in this case are mostly species that may be widespread elsewhere (like in mainland europe) but only have localized populations in Britain.
Either way, creating a collection project restricted to a list of known species would work

from wikipedia: ā€œThe Brecklands are home to over 120 nationally rare and threatened plant species, many of which grow nowhere else in Britain. With all this diversity, Breckland has received international recognition as an Important Plant Area (IPA). Many of the flora and fauna that are unique to the area have a special protection status, or are part of conservation and rewilding projects.ā€

There surely must be a list of these species

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do you have a reference list of species already or are you trying to figure out how to get such a list?

5

If Iā€™m understanding correctly, I donā€™t think thereā€™s a way to configure this in an iNaturalist project. Furthermore, it would imply that an observation would be removed from your project whenever that particular species is observed elsewhere -and it would get kind of messy for observations with ids at any level above species-. I think you might be able to retrieve a list of the species youā€™re interested in using the iNat API (which would require some knowledge in programming) or manually exporting data and using filters or something

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Off topic to OPā€™s question, but this is a really cool project youā€™ve shared. Thanks for making me aware of it!

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I donā€™t have a list on hand yet, though I could create one. What I had in mind was simply a project that only includes species which have been observed in my area (Breckland) but not anywhere else in the UK. I didnā€™t necessarily want it to be for known endemic species, just simply for things that have not yet been observed in the UK. I tried using the api and your tool by making a project ā€˜project1ā€™ that was for all species ā€˜in the Ukā€™ but ā€˜not in Brecklandā€™, and then using your tool to select ā€˜must not be in project 1ā€™ but ā€˜ must be in Brecklandā€™. But sadly it didnā€™t work.

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So, currently, I have used the api to download counts of all Breckland species, and am now comparing them manually to Uk counts to see which are only found in Breckland. If I were able to download counts for all Uk species I think I could do it automatically but there is a limit on the export size for the api.

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Try this:
Go to iNaturalist website, top menu bar >> More, and select ā€œPlacesā€ from the drop down. Enter United Kingdom. Then checklist.
https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/7190-United-Kingdom-Check-List
On this page scroll to the very bottom and download a CSV file. It is a superset of all species from UK and you can apply filters. Like if you remove ā€œblanksā€ from last observed column, then you get a set of species with at least one observation.

You may want to try a similar checklist for Breckland and then do a vlookup/excel functions to compare the two lists!

Hope this helps

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10

which tool?

what is the request that youā€™re making?

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https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts.html?place_id=6857

This tool and this request.

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okay. so the API itself doesnā€™t actually have any limits in the number of species / leaf taxa that it can return (as far as i can tell), but that pageā€™s export function specifically does limit the number of taxa that it will return to 10000.

if you want to still use that pageā€™s export function, you could just break up the UK set into smaller subsets. since a third of observations tend to be plants and another third tend to be insects / arthropods, you could make 3 subsets:

some other options:

1 Like
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Hey everyone! Thanks for all the help. It was a combination of your answers which allowed me to do it successfully in the end. I downloaded the Breckland occurrence and the UK occurrence (following pisums guidance) and then, in R, merged the two dataframes and found those species for which the UK and Breckland observation counts matched.

You can see the product here :)
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/breckland-exclusives

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i had some time today. so i updated the page to allow exports beyond 10000 records, if you add a particular parameter in the URL. for example: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts.html?place_id=6857&options=unlimitedexport

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