Species Tallies Not Agreeing.

You might have noticed that your species counts are not agreeing on different views. For instance:

I will take @magrietb [she asked!, and has only worked in Overstrand] for the GSB2023 as an example as at 13h00 on 12 Dec.

• On the observer Tab of the Umbrella: 472 spp (here)
• On the observer Tab of the Overstrand Project: 472 spp (here)
• On the observer summary of the Overstrand Project: 472 spp (here)
• if you click on the number 472 of this page: 472 spp (here)

So these are all the same. But if you look at the species seen by Magriet over the 4 days: you will see that she has seen 516 species (here). So where did these extras come from? (or :: what happened to her other species that they are not being totalled?)

This is because "species" means lots of different things in iNaturalist, even on similar pages.

• Species can literally mean 'species' - only those observations at species rank will count
• Species can also mean leaves: the finest ID made - so that if a beetle is only identified to Tribe, and there are no other observations in that tribe, then it counts as one "leaf" and is added to the "species" total

You can see these here:
basically this is the explore filter for @magriet for the competition but with some differences:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=173747&place_id=any&verifiable=any&user_id=660508&view=species
If we add

• &rank=any - then we get 516 species (=leaves at species level or above)
• &rank=species - then we get 472 species (=leaves at species only)

Note that we cannot tally below species: any subspecies and varieties cannot be reported on: for instance
subspecies :: 19 species
varieties :: 8 species
But note that these are the species summaries: we dont know if she observed only one of each species, or two (or even several) subspecies: only the species tally is shown.

So the difference between 516 and 472 can be found from filtering:

• &lrank=subsection - and now we get 70 "species" (ciick to see here)

Two things to note: (1) some of these (36 observations) have finer identifications in the taxon, so these wont count as they are not leaves; & (2) the IDs displayed in the summaries are Classes to Subsections (of Genera) - no Species are displayed.

This view gives us the clue to remembering and figuring out what iNaturalist is using when tallying the numbers:

• if our list only contains species - then it is a species list
• if your list contains species and higher taxa - then it is a leaf list.
• and iNat will never display varieties and subspecies: the finest iNat displays is the species. which is a right royal pain when so many of our subspecies are of crucial conservation status!!

Posted on December 12, 2023 12:03 PM by tonyrebelo