I have many many charts about the stats of arthropod orders on inaturalist. I want to do one for families as well, but I want to avoid the tedious process manually checking every single individually. Is there a way to quickly extract the number of species and number of observations of every arthropod family from inat’s database?
you can get observed taxa (including families) from https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/taxonomy?taxon_id=47120&verifiable=true. this would give you observed species, too, but if you want to see all species in the iNat system (including unobserved) for those families, you’d have to get those from the DWCA taxon export.
Is there a way to get this so that it’s just listing the families and their number of species/observations and not just a list of all the species?
it’s not a list of species. it’s a list of all taxa. you can parse out the stuff that you want to keep, based on rank. the underlying data is at the observation level, but the results are aggregated to taxa. server-side filters operate on the underlying observations, not the aggregated taxa. so you can’t use the server-side filters to return particular ranks without affecting the observation counts.
For example, here is Bopyridae
Bopyridae has 387 observations (with 57 of said observations not being identified further than Boypridae) and 31 observed species. In the api link it says the 387 observations (and the 57 observations stuck at family level) but it does not say the 31 species. Are you telling me the api does not/can not aggregate the number of descendant taxa of a certain rank a parent taxon has?
does not. you have to do the aggregation yourself.
How can I do a DWCA taxon export then?
Idk if im missing something but as far as I looked none of these have addressed my specific need. I know all taxa can be downloaded. I dont want that. I want something like “Formicidae; 4,000/15,000 species observed” and a whole list of that for every family. What you gave me earlier is as, or even more, tedious than just looking up every family individually.
if you think that’s faster for you, then that’s the way you should do it.
So just to be clear, there is no way to automatically extract a list that goes like this?
““Formicidae; 4,000/15,000 species observed”
Bopyridae, 31/669 species observed
Limulidae, 4/4 species observed
etc”
This is distinct from just a list of all taxa