[stinos]

I'm not sure it would be worth the extra clutter

Not likely. I mean, for like 99% the current parameters are ok, stuff is easy to use, why bother changing it :]

are you aware of any dataset that would help locate rare species

Not directly but there's sites like observation.org, not sure if they have APIs. Be warned though: it's a lot of information because there are so many species so making crawling through that handy and useful would require quite the interface.