Is it possible to retrieve phenology information at the *species* level?

[patrick60]

Hi all – new to the forum but longtime user of data from iNat.

I’m interested in extracting the phenology curves for species (as opposed to the tags for an individual observation) using Python or R. The attached screenshot shows the curve I’m referring to, which is on the lower left side of each page for a plant species if viewing in a browser.

My end goal is to be able to cycle through a list of species names, extracting a “flowering time” curve for each species.

Does anyone know if this is possible, and how?

Best,
Patrick McKenzie

[jwidness]

Welcome to the forum!
Have you looked through the API documentation?
If I were doing it, I would probably use Observations/get_observations_popular_field_values.

Here’s a bit of what that returns with this call:

So the 1 through 12 at the top are the months, and the values are the number of observations with the annotation Plant Phenology set to Flowering for this particular taxon.

The documentation has lots of other possible parameters, for example you can make it by week instead.

[jwidness]

Actually, that works, but if you really only want flowering, you don’t need all the info that call returns. I’d go with something like https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/histogram?taxon_id=84281&term_id=12&term_value_id=13&date_field=observed&interval=month_of_year, which returns only this:

[brewbooks]

Thanks for this, I have had the same question as @patrick60 myself. I have retrieved the data manually for a species, that’s a bit of work.

[patrick60]

Brilliant – thank you for this! Exactly what I was after.

[yayemaster]

Thanks. I was also wondering how to do that