How to export annotated observations

Tutorials
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Let’s say I want to export all observations of Vanessa tameamea and know their Life Stage annotation values. Currently, it’s not possible to export annotations and annotation values as a CSV, so basically what you’ll have to do is use iNat to gather a set of observations with the annotation and value you want and then export that set, which you can edit on your computer.

There are two user-facing ways to gather a set of observations with the same annotation and annotation value: make a collection project or edit the search URL in Explore.

Using a collection project

Collection projects are basically saved search parameters, so you can use them to easily get a set of observations.

  1. Make a new collection project, give it a title and add some text to the About section.

  2. In the Project Requirements section, set requirements to gather the observations you want. For this case, I’m going to choose all observations of Vanessa tameamea that have a Life Stage annotation value of Adult. If you want to restrict things geographically, you can also add places to the Include Places requirement.

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You can only choose one annotation and one value at a time for a collection project.

  1. Add any other requirements you want and create the project. I now have a project that includes only observations of Vanessa tameamea with a Life Stage annotation value of Adult.

  2. On the project’s page, click on Observations, then click on Export Observations:

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  1. Make any adjustments you want on the export page and export your CSV.

  2. Open up the CSV and you can mark all of those observations as having the Adult value for Life Stage.

  3. Go back to your project, edit it, and repeat steps 3-6 for each annotatation value.

Editing the Explore URL

  1. Read the tutorial about search URL editing here for some background, especially the section about annotations.

  2. Go to Explore and get the set of observations you want, using one annotation value. For example, here’s the URL for all Vanessa tameamea observations with a Life Stage annotation value of Adult: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=122012&term_id=1&term_value_id=2

  3. Click on Filters → Download to go to the CSV export page.

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  1. Make any adjustments you want on the export page and export your CSV.

  2. Open up the CSV and you can mark all of those observations as having the Adult value for Life Stage.

  3. Repeat steps 2-5 for each annotatation value. For example, here’s the URL I’d use for larvae: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=122012&term_id=1&term_value_id=6

If you want to quickly add annotations to observations before downloading them, see this tutorial.

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2

here’s an old thread where a few of us discussed different scripts to get observations from the API with annotations: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/code-to-extract-annotations-from-exported-json/31950.

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