Can Project data be downloaded to CSV for adding to GIS?

[R.A. NaturalAreas]

Hi,

 I'm considering starting a Bioblitz project for Reston's Natural Areas using citizen scientists. We are currently completing an assessment of our 800 acres of open space and want to add native plants to the maps. We currently use ArcCollector through ESRI to collect our data out in the field. I've just learned about iNaturalist and think this would probably be the best alternative to Collector to make sure our native plants and even invasive species are identified correctly. However, I would need the data to be mapped on our GIS for future mapping needs and analysis with all other data collected. Would iNaturalist be able to transfer data back to GIS (including photos attached to points)? 

Thank you for your help with this. I'm super excited about the possibility of using iNaturalist for our project.

Patricia 

Environmental Resource Supervisor

Reston Association

703-435-6552

[Charlie Hohn]

the iNat app is great and imho gives you a lot that collector won't. What you need to do after you upload your observations is download a .csv file of your observations with latitude and longitude. And then with that you can import it into your gis program and get all your points. You have to set the projection which I forgot how to do offhand, but it definitely works! Welcome to inat!

[Carrie Seltzer]

Hi Patricia,

I think you spoke to Mary Ford about this yesterday on the phone and got a lot of your questions answered (I saw her yesterday and she mentioned talking to someone from a project in Reston about using iNaturalist, so I assume that's you!). Like Charlie mentioned, you can export all of the observations as a csv and import them to your GIS. The export can include a URL for the first image associated with an observation, so if your GIS has the ability to access a URL from a map point, then you should be able to see the photos too. Someone else might have another suggestion. If your main use case is seeing your observations on a basic satellite or street map, you can do that in iNat (e.g. everything from Fairfax county, VA here: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=738). 

Carrie

P.S. You might also be interested in the City Nature Challenge happening in/around DC (including Reston) and 15+ other cities in April: http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2017-washington-dc-metro-area

[David Morimoto]

Hi,
I am creating an ArcGIS biodiversity map of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts (Cambridge and Watertown), and I want to export iNaturalist observations for GIS mapping and analysis. (We are going to use iNaturalist for the formal citizen science portion of this effort, along with a google earth-based grid system exported from GIS. 1. Does that mean I should create a project?).

I tried to do it and got two different results (and several results with no data), one with and one without using the Bounding Box (which is another issue - the Bounding box  for the cemetery only encloses a small portion of the cemetery, less than 10% of it - 2. second question within a question - How does/can one change the Bounding Box so that it bounds the entire cemetery?)

When I got it to download data, there are far fewer observations than there are points on the actual iNaturalist map for the cemetery, so I am not capturing all of the data. 3. What am I doing wrong/How can this problem be solved?

Dave

[Chris Cheatle]

Dave,

You should not need to do a project for an export. I don't see any place in iNaturalist that would correspond with your location. At least a search for "Auburn" finds nothing that seems to match. Has the place been added to the site. If not, then assuming you have a kml of the cemetery, it is easy to add it. Once that is done, searching for and exporting the records should be easy.