We have a project called Vermont Moths - when we get a new species, I can’t figure out a way to determine WHAT that new species is. When I go to 1500 species, I get a list that says how many obs for each species but it only seems to go down to 19 obs for the species. help!
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The only way I know to do this efficiently is to use the API under identifications/recent_taxa:
https://api.inaturalist.org/
e.g. this URL for moths in Vermont:
https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/identifications/recent_taxa?taxon_active=true¤t=true&category=improving%2Cleading&place_id=47&taxon_id=47157&without_taxon_id=47224&order=desc&order_by=created_at
In that jumble of code, you can look for where it says “observation”:{“id”: and then a long number, which indicates the observation ID, which you can plug into the URL to find.
A few moth taxa recently observed for the first time in Vermont include:
- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28234495 Apamea alia - IDed 2 hours ago
- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28231619 Theisoa constrictella - IDed 3 hours ago
- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28147212 Prochoreutis extrincicella - IDed 17 hrs ago
- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28206655 Sparganothis xanthoides - IDed 17 hours ago
- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28203543 Schinia obscurata - IDed 17 hours ago
There’s also the “Discoveries” section on taxon pages under the Trends tab, but that only works for “complete” taxa and also won’t work for a paraphyletic group like moths.
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The other option is to download your data and use Excel or similar to summarize it. In Excel, the simplest way is to:
- sort the table from oldest to newest by the observation date column
- select the whole table
- use “remove duplicates”, and look for duplicates in only the species name column
The resulting list will show you the first observation of each species for the project.
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thank you both SO MUCH!!
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