Does anyone know how to see a list of all previous exports? I’m trying to cite specific downloads as part of my uni research paper and I can’t find it anywhere. Any help is very very appreciated!
I don’t think iNaturalist has that functionality. A quick look at the API reference mentions nothing on exports. Assuming you didn’t delete your exports you may find them in your Downloads folder (if using a Windows operating system). If you did, you could host your downloads somewhere and mention the links to them. Otherwise, just make a list of URLs that would recreate dynamically what you put into your exports. For help with this lookup https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/search+urls
i’m fairly certan your export jobs are deleted at some point, and only you have access to your own export jobs. you can view your recent history of jobs at the bottom of the export page: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export.
if you want to cite something, you’d have to either store your exported file somewhere on your own and reference that and/or cite the underlying query that you used to find those observations (though there would be no guarantee here that none of the underlying data would change over time). if you’re working with only research grade observations, it’s possible that many or all of these can be pushed over to GBIF, and in that case, GBIF does allow you to permanently save the results of a query and reference that via a DOI.
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