I’d like to list the taxa observed in a certain region via pyinaturalist API and get the full scientific names with the authors/abbreviations, e.g. Hyacinthoides italica (L.) Rothm. for the Italian bluebell. When there are lots of taxa, it is very unpleasant to manually search ThePlantList.org and similar websites. Also, the taxon names might be ambiguous—it would be best to know the exact source according to which the plant was identified. So I wondered if there is a way to get the author abbreviations from either the observation or a taxon page on iNaturalist? Or the get a source for the taxon name, e.g. a link to the database where the name was extracted from and where those abbreviations could be looked-up? (since multiple databases are in use, the latter one wouldn’t be the preferred option since it would probably be a mess to search databases with various structures).
Go to the taxon page, select the taxonomy tab, click on “Taxonomy details” on right edge and then select the link at bottom right which will take you to iNat’s reference authority for that taxon. The authors should be given there.
If you want to do it thru automation your only real option is to look up the taxon number in an external database such as Wikidata and then if needed get identifiers there from other sources (and hope they have an api). Author names are not stored anywhere internal to inat.
That is only helpful for taxa that are part of a curated taxon framework, which most aren’t.
iNat follows POWO with plants, so you can look those up there.
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