How do I see which of my observations have been added to any curated projects?
The API has been suggested for me but I don’t have any experience using it, so any guidance on that would be appreciated.
what do you mean by “curated” projects? projects in iNat are typically categorized as traditional, collection, or umbrella projects.
why do you want to know which of your observations has been added to “curated” projects?
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The only way I know if is to look at each observation, scroll down on the right to see “Projects”
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I suspect by “curated” they mean traditional projects, i.e., projects that admins manually add observations to.
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This is correct.
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ok… and:
is this just curiosity or are you actually doing something with an observation that has been added to a traditional project?
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If it’s in a traditional project, you will see it on observation page, no matter if you join it or not.
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I want to know which of my observations have been used by scientists and others, if any. I’m going to be giving a talk about science at an elementary school and I want to talk a bit about iNaturalist and I want to pick out the most relevant topics.
For example, this brown pelican observation https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/133409452 was added to the project “Oregon State Parks Coastal Species Inventory” which is a good example of an observation actually being used for something.
if you go by just adding an observation to a project as an example of the observation “being used for something”, then i don’t think there’s a good way to get a complete view of what you’re looking for. besides the traditional projects, there are lots of good collection projects that could include your observations, thereby making them “used for something”, but you wouldn’t be able to figure out which collection projects include your observations without either (1) joining those collection projects as a member, or (2) filtering by specific collection projects.
…
that said, there are 2 general ways to find observations that are tied to traditional projects or other projects which you have joined. (i’m going to call these “curated projects” from here on out just for convenience.)
if you just need a list of observations, you can use the pcid=true and pcid=false parameters to find observations where project curators have or haven’t added IDs to the observation. the union / combination of these sets should get you all the observations which are tied to “curated projects”.
if you ping the API directly, you can get lists of observation ids for the sets above via https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations?user_id=spaceman98&pcid=true&only_id=true&per_page=200 and https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations?user_id=spaceman98&pcid=false&only_id=true&per_page=200, and then that will allow you to construct a single query that gets all those observations by id:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?id=146792470,144648139,135686379,134138731,129782285,122754961,94866923,91677278,91600752,91600423,91072408,90818892,89954069,89841819,88097619,146792848,146792697,146792407,146792302,146790598,146790559,146790276,146789893,146789776,146516085,146515805,146515672,146515442,146515014,146514939,146136412,145790996,145790656,145790554,144512587,143923199,143923098,143923026,143922892,143922758,143922458,143922149,138563790,136543615,135721638,135718954,135718512,135717995,135717783,135717629,135716862,135716614,135714351,135714244,135712797,135712576,135712495,135712182,135711830,135711495,135711398,135711242,135711100,135711014,135710938,135710783,135710685,135710325,135709732,135709625,135709445,135709291,135709204,135709085,135708928,135708625,135708521,135708330,135707562,135707347,135707088,135706928,135706678,135706380,135706221,135705305,135704959,135704802,135704299,135704101,135703958,135703785,135696022,135695352,135685699,134352661,134134296,133410191,133410028,133409858,133409633,133409452,133407996,133407513,133404805,132776991,126908011,126593219,123868284,122748647,122609877,121544516,121544451,121538735,121538637,121193518,121193445,121193334,121193273,117210811,111473548,111473445,108447078,108347867,108347747,108347582,108347542,108289538,108220205,108220093,107540172,103794821,98619699,97978953,97978927,97978912,97976351,97976153,97976059,97975946,97975829,97974115,97971306,97970790,97970309,91600628,91491013,91482271,91481949,91481884,91481819,91481732,91472307,91472146,91472017,91468606,91468517,91213003,90957146,90943095,90942595,90699971,90699774,90699627,90698949,90698627,90698474,90698246,90697192,90696817,90696644,90696299,90695535,90694876,90691631,90691105,90270511,90103209,90102555,90102300,90098928,90087617,89374029,88911944,88491213,88351639,86375134,86375133,86375132,86374488
but this doesn’t tell you which projects these observations are tied to, and. to see which projects are involved, you would need to do a version of what @evpink describes above.
you could automate the process using the API via GET /v1/observations, incrementing and iterating through pages until you get all of your observations (up to 10000). but you’d have to use some sort of scripting / coding language to efficiently make those requests and parse the results that you’re looking for. this might give you only project_ids. so you might also have to GET /v1/projects to get project details, and merge the results. writing something to do this might take a while if you’ve never worked with iNat’s API before though.
without doing some coding, the only existing thing that i’m aware of that would allow you to view multiple observations with a list of projects for each observation is https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_print_friendly_obs.html. you can input that comma-separated list of observation IDs from above in the appropriate input box and then click the get results button. (before getting results, you can uncheck everything but projects to get just the project information.) this page will retrieve 30 observations at a time, retrieving another 30 each time you scroll to the bottom of the page. it’s not a tabular format, but it’s the fastest way that i know of to see all these observations together at the same time with project info.
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This answers my question! Thank you so much!
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