maxresults

[maelle]

In the doc of the get_inat_obs function it's not written what the max value of maxresults is. Could you add it? 😸

[emhart]

Well, the max is technically around 5 million I think (that's how many results there are total) and I think theoretically you could grab them all. maxresults is there mostly to make your life a little easier if you don't want to be overloaded with results.

[kueda]

What endpoint are you guys hitting for get_inat_obs? If it's http://www.inaturalist.org/observations.json then your max is definitely 5+ million (though responses will get slower and slower the deeper in you get), but if it's http://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations, it's actually limited to 100k results. This is a kind of annoying limitation of elasticsearch, which we use to back api.inaturalist.org. There are some ways we could change things to get around that, but the recommended ES technique is to use a feature they don't recommend for realtime responses like the ones you guys are doing. At some point we should probably do what GBIF does and allow API users to request a large download and get back to them when the full result is generated.

[kueda]

Suggestion to the rinat devs: instead of using the page param when retrieving data from https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/observations, use the per_page and id_before or id_after params to iterate over observations. This limits the scope of the overall result set of any query and thus allows you to iterate over all records.