the new dynamic life list (taxonomic view) does provide all the data you would need to make a pie chart (or other chart) using whatever taxonomic groupings you like. here’s a sunburst chart made from that data: https://observablehq.com/@robin-song/inaturalist-observations-by-taxon?us&chart_type=sunburst&user_id=lappelbaum, and here’s an alternate 2-level zoomable version: https://observablehq.com/@robin-song/inaturalist-observations-by-taxon?us&chart_type=sunburst_zoom&user_id=lappelbaum. (the year-in-review pages have a prettier zoomable sunburst chart, but it has data inaccuracies related to observations identified to non-leaf non-species taxa.)
I can’t read the sunburst one and clicking through the zoom one makes me queasy (I have bad motion sickness). What I was really interested in was being able to see plants divided up in the stats on collection projects.
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my point was not that those sunburst charts produced exactly what you were looking for, but that you could use the life list data to make whatever kinds of charts you like, categorized however you like.
for a project, you could get the data you want using several variants of an Explore query. (to speed the process, if you want species/leaf count, start with the project stats pie chart. if you want observation count, you could start with something like https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_obs_counts_by_iconic_taxa.html. then you could do a few additional Explore queries to get data for your more detailed plant categories.) once you have all your data, you can make whatever kinds of charts you want to make.
i don’t think it’s necessary for the system to present every possible view of any possible set of statistics that folks might be interested in. sometimes, you just have to know how to get that data yourself.
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I have no clue where to even start to understand any of that stuff
you already did more or less what i was describing earlier in terms of data collection:
you could do the same for whatever project you’re interested in, and then use that data to make whatever kind of chart you like.
I did it the hard way. I went to explore and put in each group to get the numbers and calculated the percent in excel.
| plants | 30,328,116 | 41.6% |
|---|---|---|
| vascular | 29,220,358 | |
| flowering | 27,549,916 | 37.8% |
| ferns | 816,769 | 1.1% |
| conifers | 681,890 | 0.9% |
| other plant | 1,279,541 | 1.8% |
| other vasc | 171,783 | 0.2% |
| lycophytes | 78,869 | |
| ferns | 816,653 | 1.1% |
| non gym-angio | 895,522 | 1.2% |
| hornworts | 823 | |
| mosses | 434,523 | |
| liverworts | 58,619 | |
| eubryophyta | 493,965 | 0.7% |
| vascular plants | 29,213,819 | |
| angiosperms | 27,549,916 | 37.8% |
| gymnosperms | 768,381 | 1.1% |
| non vascular | 606,287 | 0.8% |
| plant algaes | 112,322 | 0.2% |
| chromista | 95,114 | 0.1% |
| both | 207,436 | 0.3% |
| animals | 37,904,831 | 52.0% |
| chimaeras | 428 | |
| jawless fish | 1,104 | |
| ray-finned | 698,292 | 1.0% |
| elasmo | 42,822 | |
| lobe | 26 | |
| all fish | 742,672 | 1.0% |
| vertebrates | 15,488,252 | |
| insect,arach,moll | 21,173,569 | |
| other inverts | 1,243,010 | 1.7% |
| all obs | 72,857,179 |
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That seems like a lot of work! Those numbers exclude all the plants marked cultivated (and animals marked captive). I just checked a few numbers for those and it seems that overall an additional 8% of the total observations has photos but is marked casual for some reasons. For plants and for angiosperms only, this number jumps to 12%, and for gymnosperms it jumps to 22%. Only 76% of all plants currently identified as one of the gymnosperm groups fall into the “verifiable” category presumably because a lot of them are trees and marked cultivated so they fall through the cracks.
There are also loads of plants in the unknowns and the “captive” unknowns are nearly all plants. I know there’s no way to count up how many exactly, but that’s another over-looked source of plant obs.
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Why bother IDing captive plants when we are already having trouble keeping up with wild ones. They will never be research grade so it seems like a waste of time.
Captive gymnosperms
Cycads 12,435
Gingko 12,015
Gnetophytes 258
Conifers 158,208
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Those who enjoy IDing, improving their own knowledge, or simply helping others may see this differently. Not everyone is motivated by the arbitrary green label.
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Do you mean the RG label?
From help page: “The main reason we try to mark things like this is because iNat is primarily about observing wild organisms, not animals in zoos, garden plants, specimens in drawers, etc., and our scientific data partners are often not interested in (or downright alarmed by) observations of captive or cultivated organisms.”
That’s why I see it as a waste of time. I know there are some people who think captive plants shouldn’t get marked captive right away since some people want to give or get an ID. And sticking it in the dark confines of casual might dissuade new users from continuing to use iNat. Personally I have decided to only mark things casual if they have been on the site for quite a while.
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Why not help observations that need it more first? I have nothing against iding captive observations, but with backlog of wild things iders should have own priorities, gladly local botanists try to eliminate Needs id other than not having the focus on one thing.
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I will ID some recent things for people I follow, but when IDing things from my area in general I only look at old stuff, working on that backlog.
Edit: Right now I’m looking at Flowering Plants in southeast, TX from 2017
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Sorry for starting a tangent conversation. Yes opinions vary on whether captive plants are “worth” IDing, but we probably would need to split off a new thread if we wanted to get into that–it’s not directly related to the feature request at hand.
A lot of times it’s not that no one knows what it is. It’s that there aren’t enough people adding IDs to make a wrong ID into a maverick.
Agreed - and there are already plenty of threads about this on the forum, so probably no need to start yet another one. I just thought it was interesting that gymnosperms have a higher percentage of “cultivated” observations than other groups. I wasn’t expecting that. These kinds of statistics might be easier to see if they were split out into their own iconic taxon.
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I thought I closed this a while ago, but I guess I didn’t. As I said above, this has been discussed by staff in the past and it’s still not a road we plan to go down, so I’m going to close the request.