Trying to view large numbers of species in Explore

oh, i see… you’re actually counting the taxa that appear on the page.

i’m fairly certain the 2000 limit (whatever it is) is intentional (not a bug), probably to keep the page from consuming too much memory and also to prevent folks from getting excess data unnecessarily. the limit used to be 500.

it’s possible to get up to 10000 records from the API for any given set of parameters.

would be roughly equivalent to:
https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations/species_counts?place_id=7830&verifiable=true&spam=false

… and can be visualized by humans a little better via:
https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observations_species_counts?place_id=7830&verifiable=true&spam=false

the nice thing about using the API directly is that you can sort by ascending count rather than descending by adding &order=asc to either of the two URLs above. that would allow you to effectively get roughly 20000 species for a set of parameters, since you can approach from both directions (10000 asc + 10000 desc).

note: usually, the API will return only 10000 records for any given set of parameters, but this one seems to allow you to get >10000 records. i’m not sure what the actual limit is, if it is limited.

4 Likes