I am very interested in this past February’s update that introduced the new geographic model.
I’m currently developing a web application to smoothly navigate into iNaturalist’s taxonomy with a focus on maps, so this is a big thing for me. Currently, I’m relying on the range.kml files available per taxon, but this is not ideal as:
1. The data is not homogeneous between different species.
2. It is difficult and very long to scrape as there is no solution for bulk downloads.
I need to download the geographic data as I want to aggregate the range polygons while going up the taxonomy. For example, I want the taxon “Birds (Aves)” to have a range that is represented by the aggregation of all bird species.
For now, I’ve made the aggregation possible using kml files but a lot of polygons simplification where needed to limit the database size and the processing time. The result is good enough but my major issue is that it is not homogeneous with different taxon, that’s why I’m excited about this hexagon-based cartography => homogeneity, easy aggregation.
Below an example of the web app focused on the Columbidae (this is a work in progress, currently only in french):
After this long introduction, I finally come to my question. Now I want to switch to the Open Range Map Dataset using the bulk download page. The problem is that the provided .gpkg files are divided by taxonomic kingdom/order and only contains 5,000 taxa per file. It seems the dataset will be updated monthly, introducing new taxa and thus adding files when the number of taxa exceeds 5,000.
I want my application to update every month as well, but automatically, so I don’t have to download manually every file. I’ve tried scrapping the .gpkg file from the web page, but it seems the links are generated dynamically. I could build a stronger scrapper that would load the page and then download the files, but before I do that, I’m wondering if there is an other solution, or maybe there is a simple folder containing every file somewhere on a server?
That being said, does iNaturalist plans to provide a way to easily download all the range files at once?
Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for your answers!
