Rails app, need plants/fungi for one canadian province through API

General
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Hi,

I might be a bit confused by the docs and I’m fairly new to Rails, but I have connected a few APIs and even written my own to serve up some data for coworkers. I am trying to setup a regular database of the plants in BC, which I’ll then curate for some specific locations. I’m just confused on how to go about getting this data without downloading a 17GB file from GBIF (and doing this semi-regularly to refresh the data - yuck). The API docs all seem to about getting your own users data via authentication? Maybe I missed something?
I’ve read over most of

tl;dr Hoping someone here can discuss or get me pointed in the right direction for connecting to the API, getting a subset of the publicly available data for a region of the world, and then I can deal with getting this into a database in my rails app and serving it up as needed.

Thanks!

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I’m not totally clear on what data you want – a list of species of plants that have been observed in BC?
If so, you can use a query like https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/species_counts?place_id=7085&rank=species&iconic_taxa=Plantae

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this is documentation for the API that you should be using (if you’re trying to use iNat’s API): https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs.

i don’t understand why you’re trying to pull data into your own database to then turn around and serve it back out. seems inefficient for most use cases.

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