Exporting all your identifications to a file

General
1

Hello,

Is there a way to export all the IDs I’ve made on other’s observation to a file? I’m thinking of something like a table with e.g. date of the identification, taxon suggested, etc.

Thanks in advance!
Loïs

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2

why would you want to export this kind of information?

…

the API can provide this information via GET /v1/identifications. see https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/#!/Identifications/get_identifications.

your base request URL would be something like this: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/identifications?per_page=200&own_observation=false&user_id=4474059&current=any

you’d have to use some sort of coding language or scripting tool to efficiently increment and iterate through pages and to parse the response to get the results you’re looking for.

one challenge is that iNaturalist’s API won’t return results beyond the first 10,000 records for any set of base parameters. since you have more than that number of identifications, you’ll have to break up your total set of identifications by some logical grouping, such as date ranges.

here’s a page that can help you visualize some of the results of the API in a more human-friendly format: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications.html?per_page=200&own_observation=false&user_id=4474059&current=any

if you’re not great with coding, you still might be able to use an automation tool like Power Automate to scrape the results from this page. this might help you get started, if you’re interested in going down that path: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/community-taxon-algorithm-tweaks/28583/51.

4 Likes
3

Thanks for this comprehensive answer! I’ll look into it when I have a bit of time.

The reason is rather silly, I just like vizualising data and would be happy to look at the temporal and geographic distributions of my IDs, the taxa I ID the most, etc

Cheers

4

you may be able to do some or all of this more efficiently without downloading all your identifications.

if you want to see the most common taxa that you provide IDs for, you could use the API to get this via /v1/identifications/species_counts. for example: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications_species_counts.html?user_id=lois_rancilhac&own_observation=false.

if you want to see the location of the observations that you are identifying, then you could use some version of iNat’s existing observation mapping capability if you filter the set of observations that you’re interested in by the ident_user_id and not_user_id parameters. for example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?ident_user_id=lois_rancilhac&not_user_id=lois_rancilhac&verifiable=any&subview=map. there are other tools to get other kinds of maps, too. (see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/in-pursuit-of-mappiness-part-1/21864 .)

there are also ways to visualize temporal distributions, too, depending on what you want to use as your basis (identification date? observation date? observation submit date?)

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Hi @pisum, thanks a lot for your suggestions! For the temporal distribution, I’m interested in the date at which I gave an ID.

Cheers

6

to do a temporal distribution of your IDs based on identification date, you’d probably have to get your identifications from the API via /v1/identifications (see my first post above). unfortunately this means you’ll have to aggregate identifications yourself, rather than getting aggregated data from the API (such as you can do with observations via /v1/observations/histogram).

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