What if you could view multiple different taxa in one search?

[wolfram06]

Does anyone else think it’d be neat if you could search for two or more different species at once? Say you wanted to view observations for the Monarch butterfly, the Painted Lady butterfly, and Blue Morphos. Sure you could just search Nymphalidae and find those species in your search, but it also includes all the other 4,000+ species in that family as well. I thought this feature would be fun for viewing the observations of just my favorite species.

[thebeachcomber]

This functionality is already possible by directly editing the URL

First, start off with a search of the monarch, which gives you a URL which looks like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=48662

Note the ‘&taxon_id=48662’ string at the end; every taxon in iNat (at all ranks) has a unique identifying number. To search for all three of those species at the same time, you just need to add their identifying numbers to the URL

If we search for the painted lady butterfly, we see its number is 48548. So we take the original URL, edit ‘id’ to ‘ids’ plural, and then add ,48548 at the end, so the new URL now looks like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_ids=48662,48548

The morpho butterfly is 81741, so our final URL looks like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_ids=48662,48548,81741. Using that link, you can view observations of all three species simultaneously

[DanielAustin]

Your question has already been answered by @thebeachcomber but it’s worth further mentioning that it’s also possible to search for search for a taxon with a certain sub-taxon excluded. Between them, these make up a powerful and useful feature that I use quite often. For instance, it means you can do a single search for paraphyletic groups like moths (= lepidoptera without butterflies) or fish (= Agnatha + Actinopterygii + Dipnoi + Actinistia).

The syntax for doing an exclusion is:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=47157&without_taxon_id=47224