Specific plant biota project

General
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Is it possible to create a project on the biota of a particular species of tree? This would include all taxa observed to be hosted by that plant. How would I filter that? Thank you.

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Welcome to the forum, Steve!

I will let more knowledgeable people answer your question about

but you did make me realize that iNat is a treasure trove of ecology data. Which is not often talked about on this forum. The observer would have to duplicate the observation for every new species present in the photo, so itā€™s a clunky and inefficient system for recording ecology. But in terms of raw data, it is there in the photos! There are probably all kinds of ecological discoveries just sitting under our noses, waiting for someone to put the puzzle pieces together.

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Thank you. I donā€™t mind going through the tedium of manually adding each relevant observation to the project, but it doesnā€™t seem that itā€™s possible within the given parameters. However, if it was possible to use ā€˜Observation Fieldsā€™ as a filter, it could be done by entering the ā€˜Host plant ID.ā€™

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if you have a fixed list of known associates, that would be very easy to set-up as a collection project. But if youā€™re opportunistically documenting all species interacting with your focal host, that needs to be a traditional project that you manually add records to

this is definitely possible, have you tried creating a traditional project? (rather than a collection project)

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No, I wasnā€™t aware of traditional projects. Thanks for the tip. Iā€™m looking into it now.

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I have made a traditional project for ā€œthistle faunaā€. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/thistle-fauna-worldwide Itā€™s not very serious, because I also include other thistly plants like Eryngium campestre. And I also include birds just sitting on the stem and not really interacting. Of course members have to add their observations manually. Maybe Iā€™ll look into it during the quieter winter months to see what the animals are really doing and sort them into categories like feeding on flowers, feeding on leaves, hiding from predators, lying in ambushā€¦ etc.

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There are traditional projects like this, that you could use as templates, for example:

One for organisms found on or in trees in the genus Cecropia

One for species associated with the bamboo species Guadua trinii

Observations need to be added individually to these projects. If you want other people than yourself to do this, a good way is to write a blog post and link to it in comments on relevant observations.

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Thanks for your help. This is the result: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/dry-tropics-grasstree-biota. Iā€™ve stuck to my own observations in my own locality, for now. But when I get the hang of it, I may expand the study area, and invite more contributors, if thereā€™s any interest.

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Thank you. Your project is similar to what I envisaged.

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Thank you. These are interesting projects. I may take your tip about the ā€˜blog postā€™ if I decide to expand my project to include more contributors. This is what Iā€™ve done so far: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/dry-tropics-grasstree-biota

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Unless you are going to involve lots of other people, why bother with a project?

You could use a generic field to input an observation field into your observations and then use a filter - which you could bookmark. Then you have access to the data. Projects are for when you want to share results and encourage others to participate - but unfortunately one cannot filter by observation fields.

For instance using: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/interactions-linked

one can link observations (handy if you dont know the ID of the interactor), and then filter to see the observations affected: e.g. Pr cynaroides. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=15477&taxon_id=132848&verifiable=any

Unfortunately, that is not really informative. To get the interactors, one has to download the data, and use the links to draw up a list, which is clumsy but works:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?id=10961295,11007243,11035637,11145946,11262743,17091419,17658303,17658304,17658305,17670269,18293283,19195768,23681592,35877606,42380262,49762480,68923883,86463761,90518218,90976375,92163901,103115665,117597576,117152440,95009417,131735587,139088624,140686257,199282172,213120386,263075446,268941787,276925402&place_id=113055&view=species

It would be great if one could do it without the intermediate step, and one can if one uses the observation field to record the interactor, but then what when one does not know the ID (or one gets and ID, and then it is changed)?

Anyway: this is another option apart from the specific Trad Project.

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Thanks. This is an option which I may consider in future. In the meantime, Iā€™ve gone ahead with the Trad Project, https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/dry-tropics-grasstree-biota, which I may later expand to include more observers over a wider area.

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