Fun Trick with Search URLS

Do you have a favorite taxon? And you want to be sure to find every observation which might be that taxon?

Or maybe you can think of a taxon people are constantly miss-identifying? (Ugh.)

Introducing your new favorite tricks:
&ident_taxon_id=
and
&without_taxon_id=

How to use them? I'll give an example.

1. Go to identify and type in a taxon. Add any of your preferred settings and hit go. For this example I'll be using Asparagus setaceus, searching for both "needs ID" and "casual"
   https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=casual%2Cneeds_id&taxon_id=75604&photos=true&place_id=any

2. Look at the URL of the page. Find the bit that says "&taxon_id=[number]" and carefully type in additional characters so that it instead reads "&ident_taxon_id=[number]" Now hit enter.
   https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=casual%2Cneeds_id&ident_taxon_id=75604&photos=true&place_id=any
   Assuming you didn't make any typos, you should now be seeing more observations than before.* The new ones are observations where a disagreement has occurred, but at least one person thinks the observation belongs in the taxon you're searching.
   *As long as observations with disagreements exist; they usually do!

3. If you want to look at only observations where there is disagreement, alter the URL again to add an additional component, "&without_taxon_id=[yourtaxonnumberhere]" I find it easiest to add it to the end so that I am sure not to mess up anything in the middle. You should have just produced a URL containing both &ident_taxon_id=[number] and &without_taxon_id=[samenumber]
   https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=casual%2Cneeds_id&ident_taxon_id=75604&photos=true&place_id=any&without_taxon_id=75604

Neat! If you really want to dive into search URL tips and tricks, check out the forum guide: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-use-inaturalists-search-urls-wiki/63

This method also works great when tackling taxa from the list of Computer Vision Clean-Up: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/computer-vision-clean-up-wiki/7281

UPDATE: You might also prefer to look at Explore view rather than Identify. That way if you tab over to the “species” tab it will show you stuff that often gets confused for the species in question. Using my example of Asparagus setaceus, that turns out to look like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?ident_taxon_id=75604&photos=true&place_id=any&verifiable=any&view=species&without_taxon_id=75604 I find that very handy for alerting myself to possible "lookalike" taxa.

Of course there's also a built-in way to do that on the About Page of any species:

Clicking the grey numbers in the image corners will show you observations with identifications of both species. So for example, observations identified as both Asparagus setaceus and Asparagus aethiopicus are here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?ident_taxon_id_exclusive=75603,75604&place_id=any&verifiable=any
Actually by looking at this I just learned that &ident_taxon_id_exclusive= the URL modification to use if you want to search for multiple taxa IDs which appear together.

ps @tiwane it's working!

Julkaistu tammikuu 16, 2021 05:16 AP. käyttäjältä arboretum_amy