pyinaturalist-convert

This is an incomplete work in progress!

This package provides tools to convert iNaturalist observation data to and from multiple formats. This is mainly intended for use with data from the iNaturalist API (via pyinaturalist), but also works with other iNaturalist data sources.

Formats

Import formats currently supported:

• CSV (Currently from API results only, but see planned features below)
• JSON (either from a requests.Response or pyinaturalist results)
• parquet

Export formats currently supported:

• CSV
• Excel (xlsx)
• GPX (experimental)
• HDF5
• Feather
• Parquet
• pandas DataFrame

Installation

Install with pip:

pip install pyinaturalist-convert

To keep things modular, many format-specific dependencies are not installed by default, so you may need to install some more packages depending on which formats you want. See pyproject.toml for the full list (TODO: docs on optional dependencies).

To install all of the things:

pip install pyinaturalist-convert[all]

Usage

Basic usage example:

from pyinaturalist import get_observations
from pyinaturalist_convert import to_csv

observations = get_observations(user_id='my_username')
to_csv(observations, 'my_observations.csv')

Planned and Possible Features

• Convert to an HTML report
• Convert to print-friendly format
• Convert to Simple Darwin Core
• Export to any SQLAlchemy-compatible database engine
• Import and convert observation data from the iNaturalist export tool and convert it to be compatible with observation data from the iNaturalist API
• Import and convert metadata and images from iNaturalist open data on Amazon
  • See also pyinaturalist-open-data, which may eventually be merged with this package
• Import and convert observation data from the iNaturalist GBIF Archive
• Import and convert observation data from theiNaturalist Taxonomy Archive
• Note: see API Recommended Practices for details on which data sources are best suited to different use cases