Maybe a very naive question: After being on iNat for almost two years now, I start wondering why there is so little information about the conservation status of most species. As a consequence, there is no geoprivacy set even for species that are regularly get dug out in their habitats (e.g. orchids). Specifially, I have never seen any red list status for Germany here.
Shouldn’t it be rather simple to update these statuses more or less automatically (at least if the data is available as csv files, at least for species with names that match the ones used in these files)?
I don’t know whether staff is ok with using the bulk template to add global statuses. Assuming not and each entry is associated with a particular place ID (e.g. 7207 for Germany), then it would not affect an existing global status.
I have another couple of questions, is here the right place for these, or should I rather discuss them with help@inaturalist?
Is there a way (link?) to get a list of all the species names used here, so I can make sure that they match the ones used in the list?
Further, I am concerned about changing the geoprivacy flags for a lot of species, even if it affects “only” the ones observed in Germany. This will affect projects and make a lot of data less usable for people, so it is certainly not mine to decide that (by the way, who does?). I guess if I leave the column empty in the table, they will not change?
There are various ways to get taxon name information, but I would guess for your purposes, the easiest thing to do would be to create a new iNat list and upload your names.
Follow the instructions to either put the names in the box, or upload via CSV. On the next page, names that find a match on iNat will turn green, names that don’t find a match will be white and have a search box.
Once you’ve finished matching the names, you can download your list as a CSV and that will have all the iNat names.
I don’t think it’s currently possible to add a conservation status without setting the geoprivacy, but I asked someone from staff to confirm.
Thank you again jwidness.
I have tried to import two Germany Red Lists into two of my Lists in this way.
For Lepidoptera (less than 200 entries), things look pretty nice, only five species not being found and one considered as duplicate, although many more names were different, but resolved by the import script.
The plants list (“Farm- und Blütenpflanzen”, about 5500 entries in the original list, abt. 4300 without the subspecies) ran into a timeout problem, so I could not manually resolve anything - but since about 1000 were deleted by the import, I could not have done it anyway. Unfortunately the original list is in alphabetical order, not in taxonomic, so it will be hard to focus on the more interesing families (whatever interesting might mean).
So what I could do now is download the lists as csv again, match them against the original lists and prepare a csv file for the bulk import of the conversation statuses. That should be fine for the butterflies, with the plants I am not sure about the data quality. Still, having half of the species associated with a conservation status might be better than none at all…
