How to export your iNaturalist observations as a CSV

iNaturalist lets anyone download observations as a CSV file, a plain spreadsheet that opens in Excel and loads straight into Stratified. Here's how, and which columns to include.

1. Open iNaturalist's export page

Go to inaturalist.org/observations/export and sign in. Any iNaturalist account works; you can export other people's public observations, not only your own.

2. Choose which observations

In the first section of the page, pick a project, a place or an observer (or a combination), and any other filters such as dates or quality grade. A preview shows how many observations match.

3. Choose the columns

Under Choose columns, tick:

Basic: All.
Geo: at least place_guess, latitude and longitude. place_county_name and place_state_name are useful too.
Taxon: All.
Taxon Extras: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. These group the rings of the phenology wheel and power the taxonomy filters. (If you skip them, Stratified can look them up, but it's slower.)
Observation Fields: All. Fields like host plant or nectar plant feed the interaction network.

iNaturalist's Choose columns section with every Basic column and most Geo columns ticked — Basic: all. Geo: everything except the country and admin-level names.

Taxon columns all ticked, Taxon Extras ticked for kingdom through species, and all Observation Fields ticked, above the Create Export button — Taxon: all. Taxon Extras: the main ranks. Observation Fields: all. Then Create Export.

4. Create the export and download it

Click Create Export. iNaturalist builds the file, which can take a few minutes for a large project. When it's ready, download it from the export page.

5. Load it into Stratified

Open Stratified and drag the file onto the front page, or click Choose a file. The file is read in your browser and stays on your computer. Plant phenophase and life-stage annotations aren't part of the CSV, so Stratified fetches them from iNaturalist automatically (it sends only the observation ID numbers).

Big projects: iNaturalist caps one export at 200,000 observations. Export in date ranges, load the first file, then use + Add another file in Stratified's sidebar to combine the rest.

Small projects: you can skip the CSV entirely. Click Search iNaturalist on Stratified's front page and pull a project, place or observer directly.

Have your CSV? See your observations as phenology wheels, maps and networks.

Open Stratified