We configured an account (neobiota_lu) with the purpose of getting notifications when “neobiota” species are reported here in Luxembourg. What we did is create subscriptions to the place “Luxembourg” (https://inaturalist.lu/places/8147) and added the taxa in question (the list is quite long…).
Now the problem is that basically non of these subscriptions seems to be working. I’m not getting any notifications on the Home/dashboard of this account, or email notifications for the subscriptions created.
Can you share a few links of observations that you think should have triggered subscription notifications but didn’t?
A collection project wouldn’t generate email notifications, but a collection project using Luxembourg as the place rule with all of those species as taxon rules might help surface these observations of interest. Is that something you’ve considered or tried yet?
Ah ha, I just found the collection project Neobiota Luxembourg. It would be great to hear more about what you aren’t currently able to do with the collection project that you’re trying to do with subscriptions.
Yes we have that project already for some time and it is a great way to see what has already been reported. However the “hey there was a new sighting today” notification is something that is missing for the people working in this domain.
The idea of using subscriptions was to have a way to get a notification once a day with the “new” sightings. In this case it would go to the email of that user account and forwarded to a list of concerned people.
The idea also came up to use a separate account because the list of species to observe is quite big. So the idea was to set up one account with a 100+ subscriptions and not have several people each add all these subscriptions to their personal account.
Basically all recent observation from the Neobiota Luxembourg project should have triggered the notification.
It might be worth noting that iNat simplifies polygons on upload. The official standard place that iNat has for Luxembourg has 99.9% of the species and 99.7% of the observations contained in the place that you created.
Yes, but if you want notifications of that taxon from a particular place instead of the whole world, you need to subscribe to notifications from the place, adding the taxon name.
There are some quirks with place searches in network sites where they are restricted to descendant places of the network site place, which would explain why the place isn’t coming up on inaturalist.lu.
Ok I see, this seems to have “resolved” that issue, I added this specific place as a child of the standard Luxembourg and the search now works. It’s not ideal however
a good thing is that I haven’t experienced this issue with any other feature like projects or searches
It turns out that place/taxon notifications are configured to send notifications of observations descended from the selected taxon but not at the selected taxon. It has likely been this way for several years, without detection.
I am trying to determine how the planned changes to subscriptions and notifications will impact this kind of notification to determine whether to fix as-is or in the context of the other changes.
In the meantime, if some of the subscriptions would be appropriate to change to genus (I know many aren’t), that would trigger notifications.
