Hi there. I’m doing a project using iNaturalist to track the most common birds in a specific area over time. I wanted to make some neat graphs using this data, so I was going to export my queries into CSV/TSV file format and then fiddle around with it in Python. However, the export page in iNaturalist doesn’t show an option for me to only download the 50 most observed species over a set of time. So I’m downloading sets of data that are needlessly large. Is there any way to fix this issue in the web browser before I download the data?
Tangentially, is there any way to download a dataset that contains multiple different date ranges? for example, the same month of dates but from the last 10 years.
you can specify multiple taxa that you want to filter for (ex. &taxon_id=123,456), or you can set up a list within the system and filter for the list (ex. &list_id=789).
you can filter by observed date / range / year / month / day / hour or by created date / range / year / month / day.
if you’re working in Python, it’s possible that getting data directly from the API is going to be more efficient than working from a downloaded set of observation-level records, since the API has various endpoints that can deliver different kinds of aggregated data. but what is most efficient depends on exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.
there’s also the pyinaturalist module for Python that may or may not simplify the task of getting data from v1 of the API (or an earlier deprecated API). v2 of the API is technically still in beta but has already rolled out in some of the mobile apps and many parts of the website. v2 is very similar to v1, but differs enough – prioritization of uuids over numeric ids, need to explicitly specify which fields to return, etc. – that if you’re doing significant coding, then you’ll want to look at the differences between v1 and v2 and decide which you want to use for your project before starting. pyinaturalist has only limited support for v2 so far.