Hi
Im a new user. I wonder if there is a way tor sort my findings so that I can see all corals, sponges and other underwater creatures except for fish. I can sort out for example plants, birds, mammals, spiders and fish. But no category seems to sort out corals and for example a Spirobranchus giganteus. What do I dont understand.
Best regards from
Viveka from Sweden sailing around the world and currently i bords paradise of Panama.
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iNaturalist’s database is built around taxonomy, and there simply is no taxonomic rank for sea dwelling creatures. You could create a project and manually add each taxa that you consider a sea creature, other than fish.
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yes, you can do this by manually editing the URL
for example, to exclude corals, add the following text to the end of the URL of whatever search you do
&without_taxon_ids=202756,340493
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I support the URL comment above but would like to suggest another approach.
Instead of reducing “fish” down by excluding, try to specify what you want to look for.
If you wanted to see all your observations including sponge and coralls but excluding fish, this is your url which filters for your observations in Cnidaria and Porifera:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_ids=47534,48824&user_id=vivekaocherik&verifiable=any
In most cases it helps to filter your own observations by adding: &reviewed=any
to the URL, because your own observations are mostly reviewed by yourself… Weird concept.
You can add more ID numbers to the url to include or exclude more.
Is that any close to what you wanted to achieve?
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A good start would be to search for animals excluding vertebrates. Obviously, there are terrestrial invertebrates, so you probably also need to specify a marine place.For example, this url: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=131021&subview=map&taxon_id=1&view=species&without_taxon_id=355675
shows invertebrate animals in Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Site. This still includes some island and shoreline inverts (e.g., spiders and insects) so you might choose to also exclude those taxa.
If you want to manually tag your observations, I believe the simplest way would be observations fields. There should be an option on any of your observations to add an observation field, and there already is a field called “underwater”.
Once you do that, clicking that field on any observation will make this menu pop up:
If you click “Observations with this field” you will be taken to a page with all observations marked with the “underwater” field. If you just want to see yours, click the “filters” button on the top and select “Your observations”.
If you have many observations to tag you might want to make use of the batch edit tool, accessible by clicking your icon in the top right of the page then clicking “edit observations” and then “batch edit”
and finally “batch edit”
This is all based on the web version of iNaturalist as that is the only one I really use.
I’m still quite new to iNaturalist so if anyone knows of a simpler way please share!
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There is no built-in way to do this because, while it may feel like a natural grouping, “underwater creatures except fish” is as much an ad hoc category as “spotted creatures with more than four legs” or “creatures that lay white eggs”.
There are ways to achieve what you want by manually adding an observation field to each of your observations you want to include; or perhaps even more straightforwardly by adding a tag to each of the observations. Those options could be a lot of work if you have many observations, though, and they rely on you remembering to keep up with that system as you add each new observation, so my recommendation would be to use the URL method of building a complex of included/excluded taxonomic branches, as described by @thebeachcomber and @IDfanatic and @dlevitis.
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I think a good approach that uses the exclusion of taxa as mentioned by @thebeachcomber would be:
~ Go to Your observations and use the Project filter with the Worldwide Marine Life project (one caveat is that it will only show Research grade observations, but you can use the Worldwide Marine Lifee Needs ID one for the rest)
~ Then you can exclude fish (Actinopterygii = 47178) or vertebrates (Vertebrata = 355675), adding their corresponding taxon IDs to the URL using &withouth_taxon_id= (or &withouth_taxon_ids= for two or more taxa).
Here, I looked up all of my obs that meet the requirements of the Worldwide Marine Life project and excluded the Actinopterygii.
(You can use the link and just change the user_id by your username: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=worldwide-marine-life&user_id=roysh&verifiable=any&without_taxon_id=47178)
You can look up the IDs by searching the group(s) you want to exclude with the Search bar; it will be in the URL.
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