Total number of iNat Species is decreasing

[thebeachcomber]

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Opera, Chrome

(note that numbers will keep going up a little when you check this later)

Go to explore, and filter to Date Added, end date of 30/11/23. You get this

Now do the same thing, but untick verifiable only, so that casual observations are also included. We now get this

it isn’t possible for the number of species to be lower for the larger pool, yet somehow…
(and by more than 1000 as well!!)

[pisum]

this sort of thing has occurred and been fixed before: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/total-number-of-inat-species-is-decreasing/31811/12.

[thebeachcomber]

thanks, I’ll reopen and merge

[thebeachcomber]

@pisum

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.

as per my post above, this issue has cropped up again

[kevinfaccenda]

I tried going through some of the iconic taxa to see if it applies to all iconic taxa and did not observe it for plants, mammals, birds, or “unknowns”.

[tiwane]

Thanks, I let our devs know.

[tiwane]

Should be fixed now, but will probably happen again in about a year. We have to increase the ceiling every so often.

Solution: stop observing so many species! ;-)