Some older RG observations of mine do not have GBIF outlinks despite being in GBIF

Bug Reports
1

Platform: Irrelevant

App version number, if a mobile app issue:

Browser, if a website issue:

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/308414953

Screenshots of what you are seeing:

Description of problem:

Step 1: I have recently generated Year-in-review for my profile https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2025/einsum

Step 2: the RG observations count and GBIF count are not matching which made me notice them.

Step 3: My license was CC-BY-NC and now CC-BY. (aka not license issue)

Step 4: As with one observation linked above as example, its very old RG observation with existing GBIF page = https://www.gbif.org/species/1710513

Step 5: Everything in those non-synced observations qualify for GBIF sync.

Step 6: Even if taking into account that syncs happen in stepwise manner, some of my observations RGed after that observation above is still synced to GBIF.

2

The process to send things to GBIF has multiple steps. After an observation qualifies, the next time iNat generates an export for GBIF, it will be included. This happens weekly. Then GBIF has to ingest the new export. This is also supposed to happen weekly, but iNat has no control over it. (You can see the ingestion history here.) Then once the record is in GBIF, iNat has to read back in the GBIF number to create the outlink back to GBIF. Tony said this happens monthly, but it seems like sometimes it takes longer than that.
At any rate, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/308414953 is already in GBIF, the thing that’s missing is the outlink where iNat knows the GBIF occurrence number.

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3

oh thank you, i should have noticed gbif map.

so with that, maybe those others are also stuck with similar issue then - missing outlinks, and some other issue also exists in outlink_source=GBIF filter - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?outlink_source=GBIF&page=2&place_id=64144&subview=table&user_id=8947850&verifiable=any&year=2025 in these outlink filtered set, Eupterote orientalis observation is missing but its both outlinked and synced.

Not sure if this counts as bug or just pending outlinks appearing then (although the above observation is older than 3months here)

can a mod edit title to highlight on outlink issue rather now?

4

The issue there is that the year parameter is based on the date observed rather than the date created, so you’ll find that observation with https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?outlink_source=GBIF&place_id=64144&subview=table&user_id=8947850&verifiable=any&year=2024 (2024 instead of 2025).

1 Like
6

thanks again. seems its only GBIF outlink issues in some observations then.

the oldest observation i can find in mine is 4 months old with this issue - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/297506848

and some observations recent than this do have those outlinks properly. i will update here in few weeks if missing ones change else its a bug to check.

1 Like
7

I fixed it for you by clicking on the DQA at bottom of record. Made the GBIF badge appear. Common issue where the badge doesn’t always appear.

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/gbif-uploads-from-inat-why-are-some-skipped/63857

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