I work for a Natural Heritage Program. First off I can say unequivocally that iNat is a game changer for many of our lesser known species and is rapidly becoming one our primary sources of data for many species. We are currently establishing a workflow to use the API to access data in iNat, but are primarily working off of personal accounts. I’d like to move to using an account for our organization for data transfer using the API. After talking to our programmer, it looks like there are content and participation requirements for that account to be able to interact with the API. I’d rather not use our organizational account for identifications of records or to post observations. This seems like something better handled with my individual account so that others can assess my expertise (or lack thereof) and directly interact with me.
Curious if any one has dealt with a similar situation? Is there a way to bypass these requirements for an account associated with an institution? Worst case we just add 10 identifications and some observations but it seems cleanier to address the root issue.
If you don’t need to make authenticated requests, there’s no requirement for IDs. Even if you do need to make authenticated requests, you can just copy your token from the web.
The OAuth app is basically for programmatically accessing credentials, e.g. if you made an app and you wanted your users to be able to interact with their iNat accounts.
Related discussion here.
I’d rather not use our organizational account for identifications of records or to post observations.
In general we’d like people to post observations to their own accounts, as iNat is a community and people should be able to interact with the individuals who posted the observations (so they could ask questions of the actual observation, for example). What’s the purpose of using an institutional account for posting observations?
Can you email help@inaturalist.org with details?
From the other part of their comment:
it seems like the want to avoid using the institutional account for posting observations. They just want it for API access, but appear to be concerned that there may be posting, ID, or other requirements that would need to be satisfied by that account before being able to gain API access.
Thanks, I missed that!
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