Missing Date, Identification Method

One thing that keep many images from research grade is missing a date. This can happen for a variety of reason, mainly do to the uploading of images without metadata. Regardless of how a data went missing, they do prevent the achieving of research grade status. Currently, iNaturalist has no method to search for post without dates.
Even looking through https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/search+urls#multiple-taxa

The method I use doesn't require URL encoding.
First to switch to causal observation since the Data Quality Assessment (DQA) make all observation without date causal.
Second filter for Has Photo and/or Has Sound to remove any asserted observations.
Third set, a sufficiently specific location so they are less than 10,000 results, which is about 330 pages. iNaturalist does not allow you to page past that number. I find counties are usually a good level to start with, but you may need additional filters. I would suggest Categories or Date Added to limit the number of observations.
Fourth switch, sort by field to Date Observed. This will put all observations with observation date before all observations without. This will happen regardless if you have ascending or descending select because of the way the database work; null values (missing dates), returns false when compared with an actual date (i.e. 2022-12-12 > null = false and 2022-12-12 < null = false).
Finally, you can go to the last page and see all the observation without dates. Note that some may be Captive/Cultivated or have other deficiencies.

I hope this help. If you have improvement to the method or want to improve the documentation, please let me know and I will edit this post or link to a post you make.

Posted on December 29, 2022 07:23 PM by jared_lincenberg