Unobserved species link shows species I have observed

Bug Reports
1

Platform: website, accessing from iPhone Safari browser

Browser, if a website issue: Safari (mobile)

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&place_id=10&unobserved_by_user_id=veltkamp&view=species

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

IMG_5836
IMG_58361125Ă—2436 306 KB

Description of problem:

For the last few months I have been using a link that I saved to access a list of species I have not observed. I just noticed today that the link now shows me species that I have observed, such as Douglas Fir, Oregon Oak, Mallard, etc.

Step 1: Open this link: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&place_id=10&unobserved_by_user_id=veltkamp&view=species

Step 2: In the URL, replace my username “veltkamp” with your username

Step 3: In the URL, change the place ID from 10 to your desired place ID

Step 4: The link used to show only species that were not observed by the specified user, but now shows some species that have been observed. What has changed? Two days ago, the species at the top of my list of unobserved species in Oregon was Pandora Pine Moth, but it is now Douglas Fir, which I have observed in Oregon 12 times.

2

Could it be because you haven’t observed Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca? You have 11 species-level observations and one P. m. var. menziesii. That said, I have also noticed some species I have observed showing up in my own unobserved searches.

3

Yes, I can confirm this problem. Something has changed recently, apparently regarding the handling of subspecific ranks. In my case, I have a bookmark for my unobserved plant species in Central Oregon:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&place_id=61575&unobserved_by_user_id=twainwright&view=species&iconic_taxa=Plantae
now shows 187 observations of Pinus ponderosa, which I have observed and wasn’t shown the last time I checked the bookmark (a few weeks ago). This also seems odd, as there are over 1,000 observations of ponderosa pine in that region - however, 187 is the exact number of observations ID’d to variety ponderosa. If I add “lrank=species” to the URL:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?hrank=species&lrank=species&place_id=61575&unobserved_by_user_id=twainwright&view=species&iconic_taxa=Plantae
then ponderosa disappears from the list, which seems like a workaround, but will also (I think) exclude any species that are ONLY ID’d at a subspecific rank in that area.

This is confusing, as the list only reports taxa at the species level even when ID’d at a finer level, so it isn’t obvious what the problem is.

4

this is not a new thing. my opinion is that there is no bug, but it can be confusing. see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/unobserved-by-user-id-subspecies/17563.

you could try this to see if it gives you results that are more expected: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/discover-how-many-of-the-top-100-most-observed-species-in-a-place-youve-spotted/66507

1 Like
5

Observations · iNaturalist
Scroll down to the 14 observation mark and see that I am missing Rumex obtusifolius(I have something like 100 observations of it).
The subspecies are sometimes listed on there even though you’ve observed the species. Don’t know if it’s removable.

6

Thanks for reporting. Two days ago we deployed a change to have the website observations search/explore page use v2 of our API. It appears there was a bug with the unobserved_by_user_id parameter in v2 when used in the species_counts endpoint where its behavior did not match v1. It was not removing species when their infraspecies had been observed, which v1 was doing. We just deployed a fix and it looks like the results from v2 are now consistent with v1, so the observations explore page should be performing as it did on Monday and before. Please let us know if you notice any other problems with the Explore page search results.

2 Likes
7

Yes, it now looks the way it used to. Thanks for the quick fix!