Is there a way to view project stats in the same/similar format to the country stats that have been being posted?

General
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Just as the title says. Is there a pre-existing way to view a the stats for a project in the way the country stats have been being shown in the country showcase?

It would be really nice to be able to quickly see the observations over time in a graphical format, and to see that for individual observers who have contributed to a project.

It can obviously be done by downloading the observations and charting them in Excel or something like that, but it would be much nicer if there was a pre-existing way of doing so directly on the site.

This isn’t a feature request, just a question as to whether it’s possible.

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you could probably use the results from the API histogram endpoint (https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/#!/Observations/get_observations_histogram) to help you get data for a timeline. if getting monthly points, you’d have to go year by year or 12-month range by 12-month range. that may or may not be easier than downloading data and using that to create a graph. if you can code, you could definitely write something that could create a graph for you using that API endpoint.

as far as the other stuff on the world tour posts, you could probably replicate a lot of it using the API, too, except that i can’t think of anything available to regular guys like us to give the center of gravity for a person’s observations. so i’m thinking that must be done by someone with greater access to tools or data, at least if you want to do it efficiently.

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Thanks. That looks complicated to use. I guess I’ll probably just stick with downloading the data and doing the analysis offline.

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it might look a little daunting if you’ve never used it, but i think it just takes a little getting used to. the link i pointed to earlier provides you provides all the different options that are available, but you don’t have to use them all. in your example, you would just need to specify a project, a date range, date_field = created, and interval = month_of_year.

so for example, if your project ID = 5894 (Mammals of California), and you wanted to see stuff in 2019, that would translate to this request URL: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/histogram?project_id=5894&created_d1=2019%2F01%2F01%2000%3A00&created_d2=2019%2F12%2F31%2023%3A59&date_field=created&interval=month_of_year, which would provide the following results:

{
  "total_results": 12,
  "page": 1,
  "per_page": 12,
  "results": {
    "month_of_year": {
      "1": 1988,
      "2": 1809,
      "3": 2581,
      "4": 3687,
      "5": 3842,
      "6": 3263,
      "7": 2874,
      "8": 2991,
      "9": 346,
      "10": 0,
      "11": 0,
      "12": 37
    }
  }
}

1-12 in the above results translates to January through December. you can even pull these directly into Excel by getting data from a JSON (which is the format of the results that the URL provides).

… :thinking:

i’m seeing that even though i used a created date range of 2019/01/01 00:00 to 2019/12/31 23:59, i’m getting results in December (12), which should not be the case, since December hasn’t happened yet. so i bet there’s some sort of inconsistency in how it filters dates vs how it reports those dates with respect to time zones. maybe it is taking local and translating to UTC? not sure… i’ll have to look at it later when i have more time…

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Hmmm… I’m clearly doing something wrong. All I get is an error message.

{“error”:“Error”,“status”:422}

Even using your URL and just swapping out the project number (leaving everything else intact) returns the error.

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i think error code 422 means that it didn’t recognize the project that you gave it. maybe double-check it, and try again. here’s what i get when i run for Cat Ba Island and Surrounding Area (project 1726) using URL https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/histogram?project_id=1726&created_d1=2019%2F01%2F01%2000%3A00&created_d2=2019%2F12%2F31%2023%3A59&date_field=created&interval=month_of_year:
{"total_results":12,"page":1,"per_page":12,"results":{"month_of_year":{"1":17,"2":7,"3":84,"4":217,"5":96,"6":320,"7":770,"8":615,"9":98,"10":0,"11":0,"12":0}}}

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Ah, I was using the wrong project number.

Where on earth do you find the project number? I’ve looked numerous times and can never seem to find where it is, can’t ever find any documentation saying where to find it, and numbers I do find are apparently not the correct ones.

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i usually use some version of an API lookup to find the project number, but you can also look at an individual observation belonging to the project, and then in that observation detail page, in the project section, if you hover over the name of the project, your browser should show you a little pop-up that tells you that link will take you to a project URL like https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/1726. that number at the end of the URL will be the project id.

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Ah, that makes it much easier. I wish the URL on the project page itself included the project number. There is a number in the URL of the check-list page, but it’s not the number of the project that the check-list is associated with (go figure).

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