Dear iNaturalist team and community, I (together with my a fellow student) am currently conducting my Biology Bachelor’s thesis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. My research focuses on potential shifts in species nocturnality within urban environments compared to non-urban areas across various c…

i don’t have time to look into whether the filter parameters are working as expected, but this may be useful in the meantime: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/searching-for-annotations-basic-to-advanced/65375 .

could you provide some examples of urls you are trying to use, as well as specific examples of observations you say are returned in error?

Only a small subset of observations are annotated. Using without dead will exclude alive observations that are alive but have not been annotated alive. If want alive observations, it is better to use with annotation ‘Alive’ because someone marked those as alive. If you are downloading animal …

[image] Identify Filter "Without Annotation" not working properly term_id_or_unknown=17&without_term_value_id=19 calls for observations which either do not have Alive or Dead filled out (the value is null), or which do have it filled out, but it’s filled with anything other than Dead (so either A…

The problem was indeed in the search url, thanks for the reply!!

[image] jwidness: So this search excludes only those marked Dead: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?term_id_or_unknown=17&without_term_value_id=19 That query will return unknown. Unknown will include observations that are dead but not annotated as dead. The OP needs to decide if hav…

Yes that’s right, but the alive tag drops around 80% of the observations, so we need to use all datapoints. GBIF drops some observations dus to the license. so in terms of species specific data INAT looks more promising (only looking at 8 cities, so we need all the observations that are available in…

[image] wy_bio: I don’t think GBIF has iNaturalist annotations GBIF does get annotations, e.g. [image] [image] https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/891058469 https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/1291166168

Did you consult with professors in your department to see if using observations that have do not have free to reuse license is ok for your thesis project?

[image] jwidness: GBIF does get annotations, e.g. I misspoke. I meant the default GBIF website simple download page does not allow filter by annotations, and default download csv does not include annotations. The GBIF website “all filters” allow filtering for some annotations such as sex, …

I would also note that it is not uncommon that timestamps on iNat observations are incorrect. This can happen for a variety of reasons (device clock set incorrectly, timezone issue), but it is one of the data quality issues I see more frequently. I did some informal filtering of observations looking…

Filtering out (multiple) annotations when downloading INaturalist datasets

General

jwidness February 26, 2026, 2:39pm 5

So this search excludes only those marked Dead: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?term_id_or_unknown=17&without_term_value_id=19

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Filtering out (multiple) annotations when downloading INaturalist datasets

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