Let’s say I have a list of species and I want to know the most specific category in iNaturalist that contains all of them. Right now I pull up the page for each species then start zooming out using the categories on each one until they are all the same. This is a little tedious and I wish there was a faster way to do this.
How do you do this efficiently?
If you go the taxon page for each species and click on the Taxonomy tab, it should give you the entire list of named clades that the species belongs to. If you can open multiple windows, you should be able to compare those lists directly.
I don’t know that there’s any particularly automated way to do it with iNat beyond comparing the taxonomic levels list for each species. But you might find this tool helpful:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/CommonTree/
You can enter any number of species and it will build a simple tree tree with the Least Inclusive Clade at the root.
Wow, I never knew you could show the whole list like that!
Oh! I just realized I must have clicked the ellipsis ages ago and forgotten this wasn’t the default view! But yes, you should be able to toggle between the views, and (apparently) the website will remember whichever setting you use
the fastest way depends on what exactly your source list is.
if you have a taxon list in iNaturalist (ex. https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/4594914-Remarkable-Ants). then just export a taxonomic CSV from the list page, and then find the lowest rank ancestor that they all share.
if you have a list of plain text names, then you could import those into an iNaturalist taxon list, and then do what i described above.
if you have a list of numeric iNaturalist taxon IDs, then i would use something like this to get the ancestors, and look for the nearest common ancestor based on the ancestry column: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_taxa?taxon_id=635776,1398339,1072260,1305317,265955,1399175,474057,348937,1364650,637965,372589,265998,1583405,1502451,481244,523485&options=ancestry&per_page=200
if you know that your taxa of interest all have observations in the system, it’s also possible to use this. https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_observations_taxonomy?taxon_id=635776,1398339,1072260,1305317,265955,1399175,474057,348937,1364650,637965,372589,265998,1583405,1502451,481244,523485. (just look for the first terminal node and then trace up its ancestors until you find highest rank one that branches. or start from the last node in the tree, and follow its ancestors to where it branches first.)
i vaguely remember someone making a tool that gets the nearest common ancestor of two taxa, but i can’t find where that is (if it exists at all), and i don’t think it would have handled more than 2 taxa.
