I have students download observations from local city and county parks using the Web version; most use Chrome, some use Edge browser. Some locations have few observations others have 1000’s. The download remains queue for hours or days.
I asked one of the local iNaturalist curators to verify the problem and it was verified.
I think the queue is the potential problem.
do the students really need to download a bunch of observations from the system? there may be alternative ways to achieve a similar result, depending on what you’re really trying to teach them.
i just tried exporting about 200 observations and had no issues. you may need to provide more specific examples, if you actually want someone to be able to effectively troubleshoot potential issues.
one thing that i would suggest is that you have whoever is seeing problems refresh the page in their browser. the page doesn’t necessarily update by itself when the export is complete.
We have tried refreshing the browser. the exercise is about species area relationships and different taxonomic groups having different relationships shown in rank abundance diagrams. So the students do have to download many observations from particular projects with known area to complete the exercise. This is year eight running this exercise and we have never had this persistent problem. The curator we talked to also said, after waiting for hours for the download, they had not encountered this problem before
you might be able to get the data you need from the API. if you’re just going to aggregate the data (sum/count by taxon) anyway and are not really looking at individual observations, /v1/observations/species_counts might provide the data you need in aggregated form. here’s an example of a page that displays that kind of information from the API (and will also allow you to get those results in a CSV): https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts.html?place_id=175682&verifiable=true&options=ancestry
as noted earlier, you may want to provide more than one example of the problem. more data points may make troubleshooting easier.
