Over the last few years of using iNat I’ve become more and more passionate about birding and therefore also learnt about ebird and ornitho.at
The ornithologists in my country still don’t use iNat data as far as I’m aware and therefore they don’t really count into their datasets.
But I want to make my observations count of course but individually uploading almost 6.000 observations of birds into ebird is way too exhausting and time consuming right now.
Is there a way to sync the data or at least make uploading iNat data to ebird more easily feasible?
Thank you in advance, I’m looking forward to reading your answers :)
i think eBird offers only manual entry and spreadsheet upload for data, and media has to be manually input.
you could just download your observations from iNat and format the records to match the ebird spreadsheet.
i don’t know if anyone’s made anything to do that, but i doubt it because there’s a lot of translation that you’d probably have to do yourself (ex. iNat place to ebird Hotspot, etc.) (i did a quick search of the forum but didn’t find anything, but i didn’t look very hard. i didn’t check in GitHub, but it’s possible that someone’s written something to do at least some of that conversion there.)
eBird is best suited for data in which the distance traveled, time spent and ID of all individuals is noted, not just those photographed. Do you have all those things, or are you talking about trying to upload all your photos to eBird? While it’s possible to enter incidental checklists of just a few photographed species, this doesn’t add that much to the eBird database, unless it’s an area with very little data where those species have not yet been entered.
I used the Scythebill software for this as a one-off “seed eBird with my past verifiable observations” import. It still required a lot of manual improving later because I wanted the whole thing to make sense, but it certainly was faster than it would have been otherwise.
The purpose was to then use eBird alongside iNat so I can also list stuff on eBird I didn’t manage to photograph and just iNat what I did manage, though - I feel going the import/export route on a regular basis would just be too annoying.
It is based on the eBird batch upload of historical lists.
No photos are uploaded, it is just for adding historical observations of single birds if the species is not in my eBird “life list”. It is still command-line only, but someday I’ll turn it into an app.
Unfortunately, eBird is very limited in its input capabilities and offers no API whatsoever for adding data. Instead it must be done manually with a spreadsheet (as if it were the 1990s). You should ask the eBird folks to add an API for inputting data, as otherwise it is unnecessarily difficult.
Be aware that if your observations are already in iNat, they are available to researchers through GBIF, so it might not be worth adding more than a few life-list building checklists (if that’s what you want to achieve) or some of the more interesting or unusual records (if that’s what you want other birders to have access to via eBird maps).