The iNat Help page suggests that the GBIF export tools are “excellent” but I can’t seem to figure out how to do one simple thing: I want to download all Lepidoptera records from a specific iNat “Place”: Greater Austin, TX. I need to wander through more help menus on GBIF but I’m not finding Administrative Areas for GBIF data lower than state level. Am I overlooking something? Or should I do this export from iNat instead?
1 Like
Following this same iNat recommendation, I tried to take advantage of GBIF database and download all the references recorded in all possible databases of a place, a Spanish village where I am now, to have a reference list of plant species here.
I also hoped to find the place defined, but finally I searched for the coordinates on Google and calculated an approximation for the box of coordinates to fulfill the place requirements.
And after all this work researching what to do and how to do it, it turns out that gibf only takes from iNats the observations credited with BY-NC, which is a decission I’m not understanding, and that also rise the question about crediting observation and image independently.
Also, the some 100 records present in Anthos, an official Spanish database on plants created by CSIC, when I make a search by location doesn’t appear on this Gbif search by coordinates. None of them. I finally only get some observations done through Pl@ntNet.
GBIF does not store iNat place boundaries. If you want to use iNat boundaries, you can download the kml (e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/places/geometry/greater-austin.kml), convert to geojson (which can be done with an online converter), and upload the boundary to GBIF by pasting the text of the geojson into the appropriate box.
In this case, GBIF also had to simplify the boundary afterwards, but the shape is mostly preserved.
Perhaps the bigger issue, as textileorchard mentioned, is that GBIF doesn’t take all iNat records. It takes all Research Grade records with either CC0, CC BY, or CC BY-NC licenses. If that matters to you, you should use iNat’s export tool instead.
6 Likes
if you change the end of your download link to .geojson (instead of .kml), that should get you the text of a geojson directly, i think. ex: https://www.inaturalist.org/places/geometry/greater-austin.geojson
2 Likes
I doubt that it will correspond precisely to the Greater Austin place, but you can use the GADM administrative areas filter, through which you can, say, limit your search to Travis County (and add others if you like):
https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/search?taxon_key=797&gadm_gid=USA.44.227_1
Thanks to all for these suggestions. This pushes the outer limits of my technical abilities but I’ll see what I can do.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.