Say, for example, I want to know how many myriapod species have been added to inaturalist each month or year since the website’s founding in 2008. How would I do this?
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One approach to this would be to download the data (a slow process, because there 688K observations) eliminate all but the first observation of each species, and tabulate. There may be more efficient ways. Good luck.
What I thought of (also time consuming) is to first get the list of species. Then, for each species, sort the observations in ascending order by date of upload. The first observation on each of those pages is the first upload of that species.
So, for example, for the House Centipede:
You can see that the first observation was 19 years ago. Clicking through, you can see the exact date:
So this species was one of the first added, in the same year iNaturalist was founded.
Hmm, interesting approach. I wish there was a feature on the website that could let you do this stuff automatically.