I’ve created a small web app called Taxonomic Tree. It shows a taxonomic tree diagram of species within a chosen taxon and place, using data from iNaturalist.
You can select whether to display the top 15 or 30 most common species, and click on any node to open a popup with more information about that taxon.
I built it to explore and understand the phylogeny of species in different regions, especially where the taxonomy aligns with the phylogeny. I intend to use it mainly as a reference to compare how local species are related.
I’m in the process of refining the app, and there may still be some bugs. Feedback is appreciated, and I’m open to adding support for other languages.
I would like to have options: to zoom in - out the tree, export tree to a pdf.
Also, it would be amazing to have a feature to compare two taxons and see the smallest clade containing both taxa. I’ve been looking for a simple-to-use tool online for that, but no look so far.
Small bug/question - tool worked for simple searches, but “Squamata“ in “Rota, ES“ retuns no results while this is incorrect.
Zoom should be doable. I’ll see if I can work something up in the next few days. PDF export will be difficult, a simpler alternative would be a svg image export.
Getting the smallest clade from two taxa will be out of scope for this app. But you should try https://labs.minutelabs.io/Tree-of-Life-Explorer/ . It also uses phylogeny rather than taxonomic tree.
Regarding the bug. It looks like there are 2 entries in iNaturalist for Rota, ES. The first one might have the wrong boundaries for the location. The second one I believe is working.
The language is being set by looking at your preferred language in your browser settings. Then it shows the common names for that language from iNaturalist.
I’ll add the URL queries for place and taxon in a few days. I was originally going to do that, but I left it out so I could get something working faster.
Sorry, thought my browser was English, but this one is not… Nice to play with, but I am not sure if I will use it.. There should be a database of stuff build on the API of iNaturalist.
Yeah, the thread for this app was suggested to me after I posted.
The rendered tree is quite similar in both apps. But I want the tree to be based on location rather than user. I’m most interested in being able to view taxa in different locations, so it gives me a reference point for species identification in places that have similar but not the same species as my local area.
That’s really cool! I quite like it. Something to correct though - only genus and species names should be italicised, with everything higher (tribe, family, order, etc.) not italicised.
i don’t think there’s anything about the other thing that precludes it from being modified to handle either users or places or both. unless there’s something that you really dislike about that other thing, seems like it would make sense to try to update that other thing rather than try to recreate something that is almost the same thing.
Hi @matthew_connors thanks for the call out. It looks like this will apply to animalia, but not fungi or plantae. If this sounds correct I can update it.
I have most of the core features I want developed in my app, so i want to continue using what I’ve built. Future work will focus on refinement, so there shouldn’t be any further crossover of features.
It mostly still works I hope, exports/markdown generation are busted or wonky I think. Sorry don’t want to hijack the thread. It’s cool to see more people building on iNat data @wooden_box I think there’s a lot more space to explore visualization and application using the data
I agree there’s probably some interesting use cases for iNat data that haven’t been thought up yet. At least I’ve found one use that will hopefully be practical for me.