Data and export

Species

The species list shows each species with its record count. You can group the list at genus, species or subspecies level. When you select an entry, each view narrows at the same time.

The Rank selector sets the level of the list and the level of the filter together. Read Taxonomy for what each rank contains.

Which taxa the app collects

Options → iNaturalist taxa sets which taxa this app asks iNaturalist for.

Give a name at any rank. iNaturalist returns everything below the name that you give:

You enter	You get
`Amanita`	One genus
`Amanitaceae`	One family, and each genus in it
`Fungi`	Every fungus

A whole kingdom is therefore one entry, and not a list.

The ready-made lists

List	What it collects	Approximate size
FRMS genera	The 42 genera that this project collects	Tens of thousands of records
All fungi	Every fungus, with the lichens, moulds and rusts	Hundreds of thousands
All plants	Every plant. Useful as host context	Millions
All animals	Every animal	Millions
Fungi and plants	Both, in one dataset	Millions

Select a list, or build your own. Type a name and click Add to add one. Click the × on a name to remove it.

The list is a setting, so it follows your account to your other devices.

Caution A fetch from the browser collects one taxon at a time, and each one can take a minute. A whole kingdom is correct as a setting, but the pipeline is what collects it.

How to give the list to the pipeline

The Python pipeline reads an environment variable. Open For the pipeline to see the line for your list, with the names already in it. Copy the line into the pipeline's .env file, then run the pipeline.

Table

The table shows all the observations with their enriched columns. You can sort it and search it. The app renders only the visible rows, so the full set stays responsive.

Filters

A filter applies everywhere: to the map, the charts, the table and the analysis.

Filter	Notes
Country, state, county	Parsed from the iNaturalist place string
Radius	The distance from a point that you choose
Year, month, week	ISO week, to match the week-of-year chart
Date range	A start date and an end date
Minimum records	Removes taxa below a count, by species or by genus

Minimum records counts the records after the other filters. It therefore means "enough records in what I am looking at". When you narrow to one county and ask for 25, you get the species that are well sampled in that county.

A species that was seen twice cannot tell you where it fruits.

Saved subsets store the full filter state under a name. One click restores it. The chip describes itself from what is actually set.

Export

The Export button is on the table and on each finished job. It downloads the records that you can see, with the filters applied.

Choose a format

GeoJSON puts each record in the geometry, with its properties. Use it for GIS software: QGIS, ArcGIS, geopandas.
CSV writes one row for each record. Use it for a spreadsheet.

Choose the columns

An enriched row is wide. A job that ran each stage produces approximately forty columns. The menu therefore lets you choose:

Shown in the table exports the columns that are on the screen. This is the default.
Everything exports each column in the dataset.
Choose opens a checkbox for each column.

The coordinates always survive. In GeoJSON they are in the geometry, so a narrow column list cannot remove them. In CSV they get their own longitude and latitude columns, because a CSV has no other place for them.

Note Some sources fetch their rows only when you download them. The app cannot list the columns of one of these before the download, so it offers no column picker and exports everything.

What the file contains

The CSV uses \r\n line endings and a UTF-8 byte-order mark. Excel then reads accented names correctly.
A value that starts with =, +, - or @ gets a leading apostrophe. A spreadsheet reads these characters as the start of a formula. Without the apostrophe, a species name, or a value from a record that somebody else wrote, could run as code when you open the file.
The file name carries the source and the date, for example observations-2026-09-16.csv.

Caution An export contains the coordinates of each record, and some of those coordinates are obscured. Read the terms of the source before you republish an export. iNaturalist records carry their own licences.