Comparing county records to other databases

General
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First time posting here!

I am involved with a project to hunt for plant taxa in my county (Martin, Florida) that are not yet represented in the herbarium database at USF.

Is there a way to create a simple list of plant records from iNat? I have used the filters for plants in my county, but it only seems to show an un-sorted display of the records. I need a simple list with scientific names that I can copy into a spreadsheet and compare to other databases.

Thanks for any tips! I’m still learning all iNat has to offer.

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You could use GBIF or the data export tool to get your data of choice: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/how+can+i+use+it

You can then bring that data into Excel or whatever other program you want to work with it in.

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First, if you just want to see what’s there, when you use the Explore tab and filter for plants, there’s a tab that says Species – that’ll show just the species and # of obs. for each one. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to download in that format.

If you go to the county checklist page, https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/4844-Martin-Check-List , then you’ll see a checklist for the county. If you click on the green Plants bar on the right, it’ll filter out just the plants. You can download the checklist (in alphabetical or taxonomic format), but I suspect you’ll get the whole thing, rather than just the plants. Of course, from there it’s not hard to get rid of everything you don’t want.

One caveat – the checklist might not be complete.

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it’s not completely clear, but it sounds like you want a list of plants, not a list of plant observations.

if you want a list of observations, then i would go with cthawley’s approach. but if you need only a list of taxa, then i would get the data from the API via /v1/observations/species_counts (effectively, the information you see on the Species tab of the Explore page in the website). here’s a page that may help you to get that data in a human-friendly format: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts?taxon_id=47126&place_id=1869&verifiable=true.

note that this would be a list of only plants with observations in the system. if you go with psweet’s checklist approach, that checklist may include plants known to be in the county but without observations in the system.

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Try exporting data using iNat export tool. Apply filters for plants in your county and select the scientific name field for your list. Once exported you can easily copy this data into a spreadsheet for comparison with the USF herbarium database. The iNat export feature is quite user-friendly and should meet your needs for this project.

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The GBIF dataset of all observations was easy to filter and download. The full list of observations was then easy to boil down into a simple list of species by running a pivot table.

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Thank you! I haven’t used the checklist feature before, so this is very helpful.

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Thanks for this. I am learning a great deal here about how to work with iNat data. In the end, the GBIF dataset of research grade records worked best for me.

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Thank you! I need to work with the export tool more. I finished my immediate task, but from what you say there is probably an easier way to get the results I needed.

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