Hi everybody, I am not a Curator, but my questions seem too technical for the General forum category. I am wrapping up my Master’s degree in GIS technology at Northwest Missouri State University. I would like to use iNaturalist as part of my thesis project, so I am writing to inquire about the fea…

[image] BrianBowers: Is there a way that I can access iNat’s taxonomy database to retrieve such a list/tree? What exactly do you mean by this? You already listed the groups you were interested in; do you want all their descendants as well? To family? Species? You could do that with Explore fi…

Just as a side-note, there are some members of that FB entomology group, including some of the moderators, that are extremely anti-iNaturalist. Expect some backlash from some of them.

Not entirely sure what you mean by ‘retrieve such a list/tree’, but the export tool is here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export if that’s what you’re looking for.

[image] BrianBowers: Is there a way that I can access iNat’s taxonomy database to retrieve such a list/tree? if you need common names, you can try https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/inaturalist-taxonomy.dwca.zip .

Thanks, Myelaphus. This export tool will be very helpful in a few months when I have collected all my data. But in the meantime, I’m looking for a list of all the millions of scientific names within my target taxa groups. Something like this (but with ALL the insects, spiders, centipedes, etc.): […

https://www.catalogueoflife.org/ might be an alternative. But you probably knew this already and have good reasons for wanting it from iNat.

Ah, I see what you mean now. A table of that scope is quite ambitious. No one source is going to have a complete list of all species for every terrestrial arthropod. The iNaturalist taxonomy itself is far from complete, and as Tony mentioned the taxonomy (especially in arthropods) gets updated fair…

Wow, comments there… just something, something from well forgotten past of id groups where most people don’t know what they’re talking about, and you’d think iNat insect ids are not excellent.

[image] BrianBowers: Oniscidea To make it more manageable, I’ve decided to limit the extent of my investigation to just spiders. And using richyfourtytwo’s advice, I got a list of all spider families and genera from catalogueoflife.org . I plugged it into my Python script, and it appears to be…

Accessing iNat's taxonomic tree for all terrestrial arthropods?

General

tiwane January 5, 2022, 4:33am 6

One thing to keep in mind is that iNat’s taxonomy is constantly in flux, so whatever taxonomic information you export will be a snapshot of what it was like at that moment.

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Accessing iNat's taxonomic tree for all terrestrial arthropods?

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