When downloading data, I sometimes want to include observations that I have identified. I see in the download dialog box there is an identifier ID box. My question is:
is there a way to download data so as to determine the taxonomic rank identified by that identifier?
Say, I only want to download data from identifications where a user ID to species rank and omit those where it was IDd to genus? I know I cando so if community ID is at that rank, but not if this can be done in a user-specificway.
as far as i know, it’s not possible in one step to query for observations by a particular user for a particular taxon or rank. (previous threads requesting such functionality haven’t gone very far either.) however, using the API, it is possible to search for identifications by a particular user for a particular taxon or rank (ex. https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_identifications?per_page=200&user_id=petezani&hrank=species), and then if you want to get to observations, then you can look up / export sets of observations returned by the identifications search.
i’m not sure why you need to download the data. if you provide more information about what exactly you’re trying to accomplish, i might be able to provide more specific alternatives for your particular use case.
When I identify, I often ID something at, say, genus because the photo or other evidence isn’t sufficient to get below that. And it may not be that I disagree with the community ID (CID), just at higher rank as a means of in essence assessing the quality of the data. So, now I want to start using the data for other analyses, but want to exclude those observations where I’ve already assessed it as ‘not good enough to be IDd below that higher rank’. I don’t want to use CID because the community and I may disagree on the quality of evidence, and so to be conservative I want to exclude those observations where I IDd at higher rank, but retain those where I IDd to, say, species. Your link looks to work for exactly that since the API includes rank=species, but how then do I download the data from that? For example, if I want to download date and time from those observations where I IDd this taxon to species rank (and not just see a list of them), I’m stumped.
in the past, when traditional projects were more common, i think one possible workflow would have been to set up a traditional project that contains observations you’re interested in, set yourself as a project curator, and then use the pcid=true (identified by a project curator) parameter and the option to export observations including special columns indicating curator id taxon, etc.
if you don’t already have such a traditional project set up with those observations included, it might be better to go with other options.
if the sets of data that you’re trying to analyze are smaller than, say, 10000 observations, i think it would be easiest to download them using a script via the API.
for a bigger set, i would use the standard export to download all the observations where you identified a particular taxon. then separately get a list of identifications where you identified at genus or above. extract the observation ids from that list of identifications (i think this could be done via script), and then use that list to exclude records from your larger exported set.
i don’t have a script that handles the exact situation, but https://jumear.github.io/stirpy/lab?path=iNat_obs_with_disagreeing_ids.ipynb could be adapted to handle the part of the second workflow above that requires a script, and it could be used in conjunction with https://jumear.github.io/stirpy/lab?path=iNat_APIv1_get_observations.ipynb to handle the first workflow.