Integrate Calflora records in Places

I understand that iNat doesn’t want to add any big changes to Places, but I’m not sure this request would actually require any substantial coding change to the site?

To manage our collections program, I would really like to be able to compare iNat obs, to herbarium records in CCH2, to other Calflora records for the basin. Calflora does ingests some iNat obs from somewhere (probably GBIF), but their interface isn’t really useful to me since you have to look up each taxon individually rather than work with a list. And it’s not complete.

It would be fantastic if we could have a tab on the Places taxon pages that would display these other data sources, so that I can see at a glance whether a taxon has ever been collected, when it was last collected, and whether or not it has any iNat observations or other Calflora records.

This would also then show by default which taxa were added to the checklist via confirmed iNat obs vs. other methods of detection, which might be really useful information for iNat to know, too.

Approved this for now, but I’m pretty sure this is not something we’re going to do (will get a final response after the weekend). Place pages are really old and won’t be changed unless they’re entirely revamped.

For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure they get records directly from iNat via our API.

Thanks!

I assume Checklists are integral to Place pages? If not, the integration with Symbiota collections, etc. could happen in the checklist rather than the Place page…

iNaturalist isn’t intended to be a data aggregator. so even if they were actively developing these pages that you’re talking about, i doubt it would make sense to add stuff from CCH/2 into iNaturalist.

CCH2 data gets fed to iDigBio (https://www.idigbio.org/portal/recordsets/0b17c21a-f7e2-4967-bdf8-60cf9b06c721). i don’t know exactly what data you’re trying to get, but you might be able to use iDigBio’s API (https://github.com/idigbio/idigbio-search-api/wiki, https://github.com/iDigBio/idigbio-search-api/wiki/Examples) to get data, and then merge it with data from iNaturalist’s API (or from GBIF’s API).

alternatively, if you could convince CCH to feed that data to GBIF in addition to to iDigBio (or at least convince the CCH members that you’re interested in to push their individual collections to GBIF), then you could just use GBIF to view iNat and CCH records together.

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We discussed this, and won’t be adding this kind of data to places, so I’m going to close the request. Adding map layers from more outside sources on taxon pages (which we already do for GBIF) is a possibility, if the resource’s API supports it.