Hello, I’ve been entering data into inat for years, and I’ve noticed that, regardless of the species or time period, I can’t find much of my data on GBIF. However, my data and photos are under CC-BY or CC-BY-NC licenses, and most of them are research-grade. It’s very important to me that my data be submitted to GBIF to contribute to other databases. Can anyone help me?
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the data gets interfaced only periodically. if you just changed your observation license across your observations to one compatible with GBIF, give it some time. if you still don’t see the data over in GBIF in a month or so, then provide a couple examples of observations that you see in GBIF and a couple that are not.
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Just chiming in to say I’m in the same situation.
My Research Grade observations on iNaturalist are over 13,000, but only around 7,900 appear on GBIF.
I’ve also made sure that all my data is under a GBIF-compatible license for quite a while now, so I would have expected more to show up. I’m curious to understand what criteria or filtering might be involved beyond the sync timing.
Glad to see I’m not the only one wondering about this!
Louis
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I only switched from CC-BY to CC-BY-NC recently to test the effect but it should not affect the uploading to GBIF according to the documentation… Both licenses are supposed to be compatible.
The fact is in GBIF, if I make a 300x300m selection square around my house (where I’m nearly the only observer and where I’ve been making the most observations for the past 10 years), I get 16 data points… whereas in iNaturalist, in the same square, filtering only the research-grade data, I get 1117 observations… Why such a difference ?
A friend of mine and I both record the Gladiolus dubius species a lot on iNaturalist because it’s protected in France. Strangely, around my house, on GBIF only his data can be seen, none of mine, even those that are several years old. The same goes for Timon lepidus, and for many other species. The transfer to GBIF seems very random and especially very rare in my case.
@louis_aureglia The GBIF link you shared is for observations where you are listed as the primary identifier for the community taxon (identified_by), not for your own observations (recorded_by). Here is the link for the latter; it has 13190 records, just as you expected.
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Ah, thank you so much @ian_medeiros — I hadn’t realized I was using the wrong GBIF field. That makes perfect sense now!
As for @pops84’s case, I’m afraid I don’t have an explanation either. The GBIF export does seem a bit unpredictable in some cases… Curious to learn more if anyone has insights!
Louis
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I have several observations of Erinaceus europaeus :
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/48368886
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/48368886
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/85215258
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/85215272
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/85224928
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/85224935
Only one is on GBIF
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/268130554
The only difference I see is the latter mentions “This observation was created using : iNaturalist Android AppiNaturalist Android App”
Not the others. I probably used the website.
Examples for Gladiolus dubius
these ones are old but not on GBIF :
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/47120488
[not from the app apparently]
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/78838276
[made with the app initially but modified with the website later]
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/79761802
[made with the app initially and not modified]
There are 262 other ones. I can’t find one on GBIF.
But I can find those of my friends :
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/82072164
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/226636436
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/226636437
Another example : Porcellio spinicornis
Not in GBIF :
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/46860690
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/50036438
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/50036463
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/83601779
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/155037974
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/277157945
In GBIF
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/267945951
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/268109000
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/268457989
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/268458318
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/268608140
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/268815783
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/270070556
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maybe iNat staff have a way to check to see if your observations that didn’t make it to GBIF were actually licensed properly at the time of the last interface to GBIF. unfortunately, there’s not a way for a regular user like me to verify this easily at this point since it looks like you changed the licenses on all your observations earlier this morning (about 12 hours ago).
that said, it looks to me like you probably had GBIF-compatible licenses on your observations starting only around 2024-12-21. so anything you created prior to that probably did not have a compatible license and would not have been interfaced.
the observations you’ve reported as “in GBIF” were all created since 2024-12-21. all the ones you’ve reported as “not in GBIF” were created prior to 2024-12-21, except 277157945 (which actually was interfaced to GBIF as https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/5153085422 but just hasn’t yet been labeled as interfaced on the iNaturalist side).
since it looks like your observations all have GBIF-compatible licenses now, i would just check back in a month or so to see if your observations made it over to GBIF.
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For what it’s worth I’ve noticed several of my observations are on GBIF despite not having the “featured on 1 site: GBIF” thing on them.
So if anyone is going by that, they might want to actually check GBIF itself (though it does seem from the thread a number of obs that should be on GBIF are indeed missing).
As noted in a previous thread, sometimes the GBIF icon does not appear until one checks and then unchecks a quality assessment field. I have found this to be the case with many of my observations.
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I suggest patience. I used to have about 30 obs uploaded to GBIF, and all of a sudden, I woke up and found more than 700 observations! Maybe if you wait you’ll be rewarded soon.