List of U.S. county codes?

General
1

I’ve been using the API to extract some additional information for some 6000 records of an invasive plant across North America. Our project, for various reasons, has focused on county-level records. The API does, technically, include county info, in the place_ids variable. But this information is coded (e.g., Alachua Cty., FL is 2511) and mixed in with an often impressive number of scaled place codes (e.g., "place_ids": [1, 19, 339, 9853, 51894, 57106, 59613, 59649, 61551, 64422, 64423, 66741, 81418, 81775, 82256, 82257, 90754, 96685, 97394, 127683, 127684, 145691, 157671, 201280],).

By any chance is there available somewhere accessible a list of U.S. counties with their corresponding iNaturalist code? Or at the least, are U.S. county codes bounded within a specific range? Any insights would be greatly appreciated!

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2

You can find all the place codes in http://www.inaturalist.org/places/inaturalist-places.csv.zip

You should get all the US county-level places by filtering for admin_level 20 and ancestry starting with 97394/1/, but you might want to double check that.

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3

Not sure if this helps, but you can get the county name for an observation using something like this (untested sloppy and probably outdated jQuery code):

var placeList = observation.place_ids.toString();
var iNatApi = 'https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/places/' + placeList;
var params = { 'admin_level': '20' };
$.getJSON( iNatApi, params )
	.done( function( data ) {
		if ( data.results[0] !== undefined && data.results[0].name !== undefined ) {
			return data.results[0].name;
		} else {
			return null;
		}
	} );
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4

If my code above is confusing, you basically want to convert your example data into an API query like: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/places/1,19,339,9853,51894,57106,59613,59649,61551,64422,64423,66741,81418,81775,82256,82257,90754,96685,97394,127683,127684,145691,157671,201280?admin_level=20
and then retrieve results[0].name from the JSON that is returned. The admin_level=20 filter will give you just the county, as jwidness mentions above.

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5

a thing that i mentioned in another recent thread by awharvey provides an example of how to do this in Python. see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/is-it-possible-to-filter-by-observers-original-guess/50320/10.

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6

Excellent, that’s just what I needed. Thanks!

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