For an organization that I am working for this summer, I want to take a look at what species I can see in our survey zone. It’s going to look something like this:
This is the best method I can find to represent this polygon, but it’s four-sided and includes lots of land I don’t want.
Is there anyone to import this into iNaturalist without adding it as a location (because it’s almost certainly going to violate the 200,000 obs rule for adding new locations.
You could load your data needed in qGIS (please see this thread: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inaturalist-import-v2-0-0-a-qgis-plugin-for-field-naturalists/74611 ) and cross-cut it with the border layer of your monitoring region.
The remaining is the data which is in your region which you can e.g. export back to Excel and review.
Are the areas for the surveys based on existing borders – e.g. certain counties or parks?
If all of the smaller units exist as places on iNat, you may be able to put together a search that includes multiple places by URL manipulation.
If you only use research grade observations, you can use GBIF.org to download iNat data with custom boundaries and unlimited number of observations. You can use whatever program you want to examine the CSV data. GBIF offers multiple datasets in case you want to get additional datasets.
I would just download the data and filter by location offline using whatever method is preferred.
Are you able to filter it to only species you haven’t observed? I have a quick save URL to specifically look for species I haven’t seen, and that’s kind of the goal I’m aiming for.
I was thinking a good alternative, is to add Great Plains locations for each state since ecological polygons can provide a lot of useful information over geopolitical polygons. Example being NM Great Plains, TX Great Plains, etc. If I import those all in within the week, I can just use the location id to fulfill my intentions.
This is kind of what I’m thinking. Five polygons for each state and make a URL to cover all 5 polygons.
New places can’t contain more than 200k observations. I suspect some or all of those polygons contain more than 200k observations.
I would do a list with all species observed in the region.
Then a second list with your own observed species in the region.
Then subtract the latter from the former.
In GIS this could be done with different layers. Or, if a list is sufficient, do it in Excel (e.g. copying both lists together and check for “highlighted duplicates”).
Is there any kind of workaround for this? I want to be able to view this list from descending order of observation counts, similar to following link: Observations · iNaturalist
I’m not sure if Excel will produce those kinds of results.
No, the limits are there so that no one can slow down the site for everyone else.
For the missing ones: perhaps this tool could be an easier solution?
Since there’s no workaround, I just collected all the location ids for counties within my search zone and edited them into a super long URL.
