Have taxonomic parents as well as parent IDs in the API

Feature Requests
1

Platform(s), API

URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant:

Description of need:
*Currently, if you want to access a species full taxonomic tree via the API, you are only given the inaturalist IDs of the parents, rather than scientific or common names. That means if you want to create a list of the taxonomy, you must then query each of the parents to get their respective names. This generates too many requests if you are doing this for more than a few dozen species. I have build a cool taxonomic tree visualizer (https://imgur.com/IkqU86d for example), but due to the limitations, I have to query the NCBI database to get the taxonomic ancestry tree instead. This is less than ideal, since NCBI doesn’t use all of the same names, or even recognize all of the same species as iNaturalist, and also uses a slightly different classification.

Feature request details:
*Have a field in the API like min_species_ancestry, except rather than list the ID numbers of parents, list the strings of scientific names. A second field of common names would also be nice.

2

it’s not clear exactly what you’re looking for here, but if you’re trying to visualize the entire iNat taxonomic tree, then i think you should just get the entire taxonomy periodically. iNat exports this periodically.

this may also be relevant: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/add-ancestor-rank-level-to-get-observations-response-api/38992/4.

2 Likes
3

If you talk about https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/#!/Taxa/get_taxa_id, you can use one API request with all needed taxa ids, for example:
https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/taxa/48460,47126,211194,47125,47163,47162,48694,48686,48685

4

Yep this is what I do too. Fetch all the IDs in one request and all the names for each ID in a second request. I imagine there’d be a noticeable performance hit to fetch each Taxa row for each ID in this request if this feature request were to happen.