You can now exclude/include ancestor/descendent taxa on the Explore page's Species tab

We released a small change to the Species tab of the Explore page today that will allow you to exclude or include ancestor taxa of results there.

On every species, you’ll see a small filter icon in the upper left-hand corner:

Clicking on it will display that species’ ancestor taxa. So for Mallard, you would see this:

What this does is allow you to include or exclude an ancestor taxon of that species from the Species tab results.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to identify a bird you saw on a trip to Japan. You could look at all bird species in Japan: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6737&subview=map&taxon_id=3&view=species

From there you can start pruning your results by bird families you’re sure your mystery bird doesn’t belong to. If you know it’s not a heron of any kind, you could click on the filter icon for Grey Heron and exclude family Ardeidae by clicking on the minus sign nex to that family:

That would update your search URL to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=6737&subview=map&taxon_id=3&view=species&without_taxon_id=4929 and remove all species results from the Aredeidae family. And you can continue pruning other ancestor taxa using the same method.

Once you exclude a taxon, you’ll see an “Excluding X taxon” under the Species field. Click on that to see a list of taxa you’ve excluded, and you can remove a taxon from the exclusion list by clicking on the X next to it:

There are, of course, other uses cases for this functionality and we hope it will help you when using the Explore page!

44 Likes

Cool! This will be a very convenient alternative to manually changing the URL. Hopefully it will translate to Identify if one clicks that in the filters?

BTW, unless I’m missing something, shouldn’t this be called “exclude/include ancestor/descendant taxa” instead of just ancestor taxa?

4 Likes

This is a neat feature! I’ve wanted something like this on the site for a long time. It makes it very easy to search for various groups within a specific taxon without having to create a project.

4 Likes

Could this be expanded to exclude subspecies, or finer taxa within a higher taxon

ex: Castilleja parviflora excluding Castilleja parviflora var. oreopola shows castilleja parviflora plus 3 of the other subtaxa

ex: Vitis excluding Vitis riparia shows 56 other species observed on iNat in the genus Vitis

3 Likes

This is great! :D

1 Like

Very useful, thanks. But I’m confused when you say ancestor. You’re enabling/disabling descendant taxa from what you describe. Herons is a descendant of Birds, for example. What am I missing?

2 Likes

That’s pretty cool. I’m disappointed infraspecific taxa are still not shown though. Having so many taxa missing makes the functionality of the species tab pretty limited for what I’d like to do with it. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to see a summary of all taxa below the species rank purported to be in an area.

3 Likes

the species tab doesn’t show subspecies. so i don’t think it would work with the existing interface.

but it would be nice to be able to exclude species. right now, i think the lowest level you can exclude using this new feature is genus, which is fine but has limited use, i think.

2 Likes

Yes that was my first thought too. Maybe it should just be called “Exclude or include taxa”. I like this functionality, and I really like @tiwane’s example use-case.

1 Like

Updated the title, thanks.

The filter comes up when you click on a species (usually, that’s often what comes up on the Species page) and you can then exclude an ancestor of that species. So I was using the term ancestor in that context, in relation to one of the species results.

2 Likes

in my opinion, “include” is a little inconsistent with what the button actually does. whereas the exclude button actually does add the selected taxon to a list of excluded taxon, the “include” button, as far as i can tell, just replaces the taxon of the main taxon filter (as opposed to accumulating – aka including – my selections in a list).

i can imagine a scenario where if i “included” a taxon, it would add that to the existing taxon in an “include” list similar to the “exclude” list.

but then i can also imagine a different implementation of the feature where in the main species dropdown list, there would be include / exclude buttons (say, next to the view button). that would be a slightly more direct way of adding multiple taxa to be included / or excluded (as opposed to having to include / exclude using the species tab).

1 Like