It’s generally good data management to include metadata with exports, especially when the fields can be confusing. For example, if you use the export tool to download observations with mixed open and obscured geoprivacy, it’s not obvious that some of the lat/longs are true coordinates and some of them are obscured coordinates.
An iNat staff member brought up that doing it this way would change how exports work (you’d get a folder rather than just a CSV, for example), which might be jarring to some people. I don’t often export iNat data so I’d be interested to see how others who do would feel about it.
Some other approaches that we brought up would be to add the option to download the definitions while the system created the actual export, or hosting the definitions on the web somewhere and linking to them. IMO the proposed functionality here seems the best, though.
Made a Github issue here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/3687 We’re going make a page that has all the column definitions, and those will be localized (if they’ve been translated by volunteer translaters). Each export will contain a link to that page. How does that sound?
Since there are over 15k observation fields, though, those definitions won’t be on the page described above. That page will describe what observation fields are and link to the observation fields search page: inaturalist.org/observation_fields