i am using api; Species API :: Technical Documentation
however for a specific species it may or may not show a variety of distributions, which may or may not include outright duplicates, or not, and there does not appear to be any straightforward way to filter the distribution data for a specific area to see if specific species is native or not to that area?
i am trying to be courteous to the API and be very direct and sparing with my calls but pulling ALL the distributions, 20 at a time, just to look at 2-3 of them seems horrendously inefficient
am i doing something wrong?
i’m unusre even if the locality NORTH AMERICA is right
like it says NORTH AMERICA
some is N.NORTH AMERICA
some is MIDDLE AMERICA
maybe some are USA
maybe some are U.S
or maybe US
i know some are “NORTH AMERICA: ST.LAWRENCE-GREAT LAKES, HUDSON BAY, AND MISSISSIPPI RIVER BASINS FROM QUEBEC TO ALBERTA IN CANADA, AND SOUTH TO NORTHERN ALABAMA AND LOUISIANA IN THE USA, INTRODUCED INTO ATLANTIC, GULF, AND SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI RIVER DRAINAGES.”
which is frankly absurd, no sign of ISO country codes or anything, there does not appear to be any standardised way to find if a specific species is endemic to a geographical area in GBIF which is quite surreal indeed…
Hi @bugz000
It sounds like your question matches the theme of our next Data Use Club session: accessing and downloading species information: Data Use Club practical sessions: accessing and downloading species information
As you noticed the data coming from checklists can be very heterogenous. A better strategy might be to select a specific source/checklist. Depending on the region and taxonomic group of interest, the source may be different. Which groups/regions are you working on?
As a side note, the checklists published by the Invasive Species Specialist Group are more homogenous: Search. This is what we use to display the invasive status on species pages. Like this one:
(from this page:
Trachylepis quinquetaeniata (Lichtenstein, 1823))
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i was just about to start working on plugging the inat API for this purpose;
https://www.inaturalist.org/places.json?taxon=Calochortus+tiburonensis&establishment_means=invasive
https://www.inaturalist.org/places.json?taxon=Calochortus+tiburonensis&establishment_means=native
i am trying to look at every documented species in north america/midwest area to generate some nice visualisations of this data to demonstrate various aspects, one of which being native/invasive, habitat, growth height so on
i figured selecting a specific data source would help but i cannot be sure they are complete across all taxons, it’s hardly reasonable to expect one project focusing on trees in texas to also have a project covering seaweed in maine, i was hoping GBIF would accumulate all this information, which it has for the vast majority, but in this case there is a clear lack of standardisation in the data which is dissapointing
do you think this would be possible in GBIF? or am i better using inat API, granted it simply dumps the locations that match “INVASIVE” for that species, and i would have to filter whether any of those locations cover my location of interest; but it certainly seems more straightforward
checking out the provided checklists it does seem pretty comprehensive, i shall give it a go thankyou 
Thanks @bugz000, I think this dataset might be the most comprehensive work I can think off for the US: Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species - United States (Contiguous) (ver.2.0, 2022) (although others are welcome to share other sources here). The dataset metadata also include a link to another dataset with complementary information. In any case, it wouldn’t hurt to combine it with the iNaturalist data.
In any case, you are welcome to contact the people on dataset contact page if you have specific questions. They might be able to help you.
