I have developped a Windows console application to generate reports that can be browsed offline, without limitation on the number of species displayed.
Several options are possible to generate a report (based on all search options available in the iNaturalist API), but also I felt like to add an extra option for this tool to generate all these reports in a single run:
The 3 reports named “No picture in Taxon page” help to quicly find taxons with no picture in the taxon page (or with only pictures from external sources, because the API treats them as if they had no picture at all). This way, you can find these pages easily and add some of the pictures available, to show them up in the taxon pages. After that, regenerating the reports will enable to include all these pictures in the reports (without downloarding again the same pictures).
Below are the first 10 rows of the “iNaturalist - No picture in Taxon page - Animals.html” report generated for a region surrounding Chicago:
I prefer the tool to download the pictures on the computer. This way, the reports open much faster, and it’s better for the server.
Below are the first 2 rows of the “iNaturalist - Plantae - Magnoliopsida.html” report generated for Magnoliopsida species observed in the same region:
There are navigation arrows for all taxonomy ranks, so that you can browse the report in both directions, skipping any taxon at any rank as you wish. There are also direct links to all taxon pages at all ranks, and a link from the observations count to the Explore page listing these observations.
First intended to solve the 500 species limitation, these reports can help discovering quickly what exists in a region and some taxa you wouldn’t even (maybe) have asked what they are. In the “iNaturalist - Others.html” report, I saw for the first time what causes a “tumor” on a trunk or “spikes” on a leaf, etc.
The usage of the API is limited, and I never asked to get an account to use it more intensively. On the contrary, I prefered to optimize this tool for sparing the available resources. That’s why the tool will also generate a reusable “Console - Taxonomy.txt” file, to learn once for all from the API the taxonomy, so that many calls to the API are spared when the same reports (or overlapping reports) are (re)generated. This way, what is good for the user, is good also for the server, I hope.
Below is the link (available for 7 days) to download the reports generated for all species in a region surronding Chicago. The ZIP to download contains the HTML files displayed above and JPG files from the taxon pages, for a total size of 1.4 GB.
The region explored:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?view=species&rank=species&nelat=44.3&nelng=-83.4&swlat=39.9&swlng=-90.6
The reports generated for offline browsing, without the 500 species limitation:
https://fil.email/rkJFFnjC
Before releasing the tool itself, I would prefer to have a feedback from the iNaturalist team, in particular to ensure that this cannot hurt the server. (I would deliver it under the MIT License).