How does everyone report on their observations? I can see them in the website but I want to analyse and summarise the data so is that just the API+Python or pivot-tables in Excel? Has anyone written a public toolkit?
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I think answers for this will very much depend on what exactly you want to do to
But in general, I would say that downloading your data in some kind of spreadsheet, either via csv or using Python/R would be the first step, then running whatever data processing/viz in whatever way a user prefers would be next.
iNat does offer a “Year In Review” which does some data vis of each user’s years. Users can also look at their life list.
the API provides various routes that provide aggregated data. so to the extent that the data can be aggregated on the server side rather than on the client side, that’s always going to be a more efficient way to get that data.
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i’m not aware of a single package or toolkit that is built specifically to report or visualize observations. for Python, there is pyinauralist, which can help with the task of retrieving data from various API routes. it has limited ability to present data in a human-friendly format, but reporting or otherwise visualizing data usually requires using other packaages or custom code to do that in a satisfying way.
the forum and other places have lots of examples of various visualizations. so you can search to find those. or if you have specific things you’re trying to do, you can describe them, and folks here might be able to help point you in the right direction.
Thanks for that - I hadn’t explored the “lists” option - it’s interesting but not really what I was after. I’ve done a bit with ChatGPT to help me write a Pythion script that uses a download of the iNat data, filters down only the moths in my garden and then gives me stuff like the #records total, date first seen, #records this year, date first seen, #observed in the most recent observation event, then extracts the number of iNat records for that species nationally and within a 20km radius to assess national and local rarity. It works but then I just wondered if I’m reinventing the wheel and whether there was a community of coders all making scripts to do other useful reports :)
what you’re describing is a very specific need. so i doubt anyone has written something that does exactly that, but the general components of what you’re describing are fairly common needs. a lot of what you’re describing is just comparing one dataset against another (ex. your garden vs the nation, obs from a given date vs obs for the year, etc.). there are many existing tools that do some variation of this, but if you want to compare raw data, i would start by looking at: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/several-external-tools-for-inat-data-by-kildor/19906. if you’re looking at comparing observation time series or comparing geographic ranges, you can use the experimental compare tool: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/compare.
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Thanks - yeah the lists seem way too simplistic to me and clunky. I guess what I’d like is some visualisation but that looks like it’s down to the user to develop their own, which is what I did. It just seems inefficient to put work through the API when a suite of good visualisations could be developed in-house that put less strain on the system.
When I talk to users around me one of the first things they want to know is whether what they have seen is rare (locally or nationally) and then most are making lists for their gardens, parks or natural spaces and so they want to get data for a polygon or radius of a lat/lon and then compare year on year what they are getting. All with taxon & date filters etc. Just to highlight unusual changes - like a species being early or late compared to before … commoner or rarer, etc.