I am not a curator (yet), but I want to add the entirety German national red list to iNat. A curator I know personally is also of the opinion that there must be a way to automate the current procedure.
Bulk adding conservations statuses has been done before with the IUCN Red List, but it requires a lot of care, naturally. Until recently, there was a spreadsheet with which you could request a bulk import of other red lists, but this has been discontinued (due to lack of staff, I think).
In the case of the German red list, there are official Excel files and I prototyped a small script that checks if the iNat status correctly reflects that list. The result is that the majority of taxa threatened in Germany (especially for invertebrates) are missing a conservation status.
It is technically very possible to bulk import them using a script. Of course, it is important to only import a status if there is not already a manually added one and to not obscure the location by default without manual assessment. Taxon changes could be traced back to the active taxon like was done with the IUCN, but only for âone-to-oneâ changes etc.
The problem is, there is neither a v1 nor a v2 API endpoint for adding conservation statuses (at least not in the public docs). There is an endpoint for flags, but opening thousands of flags solves nothing.
What is the current state of address this issue? How has this been handled in other countries/regions?
Germany (and many other countries) is in the great place to have a very thorough red list, covering almost all species in even the most numerous groups such as Coleoptera. I think it would be a great benefit to the platform to make this information available to the lay user. I, as such a lay user, was mindblown by how many threatened species there are in Germany! This knowledge is a great motivation to document specifically the more âobscureâ species.