I know this has been asked before, but the threads are a few years old at this point and I don’t know if anything has changed
Is there any simple way to export a species list? I know it’s possible to use the species lists for a place, but I’m trying to export a species list with a LOT of taxa exclusions (20+ plant pathogens LOVE to scatter themselves in random fungi orders and I don’t want any of them) and as far as I can tell the without_taxon_id search option doesn’t function on the species checklist page.
I’m currently in a hell of my own making with pivot tables on a project and I’m desperately trying to find a way to do what I need without exporting large datasets and filtering them to pull out the species lists.
that could potentially work but I’d still have to go in and add higher divisions above genus manually.
TBH I may have to do this manually anyway because at the moment the export function doesn’t account for subsection/section/genus and I really need that information for some of the groups I’m trying to deal with.
Instead of a list of individual observations, I would love to just be able to export a list of species in that dataset. If that makes sense. With all desired taxonomic ranks.
I can strip out the species with spreadsheet scripts but that is 1) kind of a pain in the butt and 2) means I have to unneccessarily tax the iNat servers by downloading a list of tens of thousands of observations of a place where what I really need is a list of like… 1k species or less.
(Basically I may be trying to force iNat to do something it can’t functionally do at the moment, and that’s fine, but after wasting like three hours today messing with spreadsheets I’m a tad frazzled)
EDIT: I put a feature request in to add the extra taxonomic ranks to the export page already, that’s just going to have to be something that I deal with for the time being.
EDIT 2: I might actually just end up writing an API script to do what I want it may end up being simpler in the long run
So if there is a species in your set of observations, e.g. Trametes versicolor, then you want your list to include Trametes versicolor and Trametes and Polyporaceae and Polyporales? Or you only want the leaf taxa, so Trametes would be listed but only if there were genus level obs with no species level obs? Or you only want species, but when you have that species listed, you want its full taxonomy at all ranks?
Given my druthers, I’d also have it in a CVS file with columns for the taxonomic ranks up to ohh… probably phylum (kingdom is mostly unneccessary but it’d be nice to sort by Ascomycota) - but tbh I could probably automate this with a script if I could just get the species list stripped out easily.
The workaround at the moment is downloading the entire data set and then running a spreadsheet script to strip out the species; for this smaller dataset it’s less of a deal but I also need to do a much larger dataset and that takes way more time to process.
The way I’ve extracted species lists is by doing the full download of records with any filtering in place, then import the spreadsheet into an Access database, and use the database to group and thereby extract the species list. So far, I haven’t found a way to filter the download to avoid having to generate the download of the full record list.