For those of you who use data from iNaturalist, what shortcomings do you find in the current csv (spreadsheet) export functionality and what is it preventing you from doing? Or phrased optimistically, what would you like to be able to do with exports from iNaturalist that you can’t currently? If yo…

[image] jdmore: As a work-around we could build a “mail merge” from exported CSV data, but this wouldn’t capture the evidence (photos). i’m not sure why you couldn’t pull in photos if you’re doing a mail merge. see: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_other/pu…

Thank you for the suggestions @pisum ! We’ll definitely follow those leads if (as I suspect) a PDF export utility doesn’t seem to be on the horizon.

I’ve created ‘Places’ which are intertidal areas mapped using polygons. I export data from our project for baseline visualisation and creating locational checklists. One big problem I currently face with exported data is with locations. Contributors use different names for them. For eg: ‘Juhu beach…

When downloading a larger data-set (ex. all of a certain place) it would be nice to also get the information in which projects the downloaded observations belong to. The information about the “collection” projects is currently not included in the metadata of the observations as far as I’m aware. I’m…

It would be awesome to integrate with Daymet or with NLCD to get the land cover of the polygon/place for the observations being downloaded, or the weather occurring on the date of observation

I’ve been thinking on this issue of how to more easily capture usernames of identifiers in a concise and useful way in an export. Currently we have fields for num_identification_agreements and num_identification_disagreements. Without getting too deep in right now, I don’t think this is currently ca…

@carrieseltzer This would definitely be an improvement, as it would allow us the ability to find data that is labeled incorrectly and manually change it, but we still would have to manually change the data by going back and forth from the datasheet to the iNaturalist observation itself. This isn’t …

@carrieseltzer Thanks for getting back to us! I think that this would be useful in some cases, though the potential discrepancy between Community ID and observation taxon worries me. I actually didn’t realize that the ID currently downloaded was the observation taxon and not the community ID (oops!…

[image] cthawley: I actually didn’t realize that the ID currently downloaded was the observation taxon and not the community ID (oops! I need to read more closely) which would be more valuable for some of my work. (Presumably I would get the Community ID if I download from GBIF?) See also thi…

i’ve been experimenting with mapping/GIS stuff a bit ( https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/which-gis-tools-do-you-use-and-why/3519/9 ), and i think i’m learning that if data could be exported to a (Geo?)JSON format, that might actually be nicer than a CSV in many cases. i’m thinking in particular that tha…

Data users— what are your use cases and requests for exporting data?

General

Topic		Replies	Views
Downloading a CSV of all observations of a species with python General programming	21	3744	March 29, 2022
Select observations to batch-download from list of observation IDs General question	18	521	February 20, 2025
Tool for exporting iNaturalist data to iRecord (or elsewhere) Tutorials third-party-tools	38	6158	April 28, 2022
What would you like to learn about getting data from the system? General	32	3832	February 5, 2021
Export a random selection of the observations of a project Feature Requests web	5	177	February 4, 2026

Data users— what are your use cases and requests for exporting data?

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