# Data users— what are your use cases and requests for exporting data? **URL:** \ **Category:** General\ **Created:** [May 7, 2019, 7:47pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/data-users-what-are-your-use-cases-and-requests-for-exporting-data/2972 "2019-05-07T19:47:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 2
**Author:** ![kestrel](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/forum.inaturalist.org/kestrel/32/54067_2.png) [@kestrel](https://forum.inaturalist.org/u/kestrel)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2019, 8:51pm UTC](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/data-users-what-are-your-use-cases-and-requests-for-exporting-data/2972/2 "2019-05-07T20:51:09Z")
So I’m not a regular data downloader, but when I do download it’s often for communication & visualizations needs. I’ll often download the data collected during an event like Snapshot Cal Coast so I can do a timelapse in Corto. So I’m usually downloading id, time\_observed\_at, latitude, longitude, and sometimes scientific\_name and some subset of the taxon extras if I want to visualize by groups of taxa. In this case I do need all the observations as I want to visualize them each as points. The other main reason I download data is because I’m trying to compare species lists - for example, after this year’s City Nature Challenge, I’m interested to know what new species we recorded here in the SF Bay Area. So usually I go about this by downloading all the observations made _before_ the CNC (usually bare minimum of info: id, quality\_grade, scientific\_name, and taxon\_id), and then all the observations made _during_ the CNC, remove species duplicates from each list, and then compare the two lists. It’s pretty simple, but it’s _a lot_ of data… when if I could just download a species list, that would be way less. Because there are 1,000,000+ observations made in the Bay Area before this year’s CNC, but those observations represent 11k-ish species. But I currently have to download all 1,000,000 observations to figure out what those 11k species are. So it would be useful in this case to be able to download just a species list in a given timeframe from places. Hope that’s helpful? --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/data-users-what-are-your-use-cases-and-requests-for-exporting-data/2972)._