Hi !
I think there is a bug with the total number of species seen on inaturalist. This amount is, today, 343.614. One month ago, it was more than 344.000. I check every day, the number is decreasing, never increasing. Thanks.
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Experts are constantly reiding wrong species, so I see it as plausible, also some taxa swaps can happen.
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I don’t think, the same issue happened some years ago ; if you check this number, saying, every day, you will notice he constantly drops, never increases, so I think there is a bug in the way the species are numbered. And this number, even with splits or delete of wrong species, should increase, as it did the last years. I have a concrete number : the 23th of march 2022, nearly two months ago, the number of species was 344 275 (I’m sure of that, because every month I fill a spreadsheet to see the evolution of new species discovered, for years now). It’s impossible that we “lost” 600 species in two months…
Could you provide screenshots and details of the exact filters you’re using? I’m not sure how this could be a bug.
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It is rather odd that the number keeps decreasing, given how many species are added every day - I wouldn’t expect the number of taxon merges or re-identifications to keep up with it. Although one possibility could be things that get marked captive after being posted, so that species no longer is counted in the main list?
It’s currently 343,610
It’s 343,605 for me now, another possibility is a big user deleting account, it happens from time to time and they often have unique species.
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343 599
Yes Marina, that’s why I’m sure it’s an algorithm error or something like that: instead of counting +1 for each new species addition, it counts -1 . The decline has been continuous for more than two months now, and even if some delete their accounts, it would not give this gradual and continuous decline (about 15 species less every day) but brutal change.
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Sounds like it is.
343,593 now.
Is there way to see summary of species that have been added or deleted during a certain time frame? Maybe curators have that ability somewhere?
Not something curators can see. We only have access to individual tax, flags, etc. Maybe the API could help.
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I assume you’re all referring to this? https://www.inaturalist.org/observations
Please include screenshots and URLs with bug reports.
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my initial hypothesis was maybe that some observations were getting classified as casual, thereby dropping the count of species for all verifiable observations.
here’s what i see for all verifiable observations:
and this is what i see for all observations, including casual:
i would have expected the species count in the second set to be greater than in the first set. but that’s not the case. so then there must be some sort of weird indexing issue.
5 Likes
Thanks! Definitely seems weird. I let our developers know.
I wonder if this could be related somehow:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/taxa-curated-number-lower-than-it-should-be/27763
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OK, we released a fix today and the numbers updated. Here’s what I see at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations
and at https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=map&verifiable=any:
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seems like we should hit 100 million verifiable observations sometime over the weekend…
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Ok. Thanks. +35 000 species i prefer like this 
Yup, it’ll be right around the next few days!
I’m going to close this bug report.
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