Help from an interested party (formal introduction) about pyinaturalist HOT 4 CLOSED

👋Hi Jacob, thanks for your interest!

We started this library to bundle some functionality we need for the Vespa-Watch project (source code here), which syncs observations back and forth with iNat. Vespa-Watch now actively uses this module, so we definitely want to keep it working. I'll leave it to core developer @niconoe to answer what his further plans are. 😊

Cheers

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@peterdesmet Thanks for the reply, that's an awesome project! 😄 I look forward to hearing what @niconoe has in store for the project.

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Hi @j-h-m and sorry for the late reply, I didn't initially noticed your message. Very happy to see your interest!

As Peter said, we initially created pyinaturalist as an external component for our Vespa-Watch project. This has some implications:

• Pyinaturalist doesn't actually covers the whole iNaturalist APIs, only the parts we currently need.
• While we can't promise we'll have much time to implement new features, we'll definitely try during our spare time. And we plan to do basic maintenance (bugfixes, security updates, ...) since we also rely on it.

This is open-source, so we'd be very happy to have your contributions, for example:

• GitHub issues to ask questions or request new features (can't promise, but we'll do our best)
• Even better, you can fork it, improve it then create a pull request, and if your changes seems also useful for the broader community, we'll include it. It's very lightweight and simple code at this stage, so the barrier shouldn't be too high. If possible, include documentation, tests and type annotations. I can also guide you if needed.

Please note that pyinaturalist already available at PyPI, so as stated in the documentation you can just install the latest release with pip:

$ pip install pyinaturalist

We do think iNaturalist and Python are two amazing projects who deserve a good bridge between them!

Cheers,

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Hey @niconoe, sorry I missed that it is already available in the doc. I feel kind of embarrassed now, should have read the doc more thoroughly! I will talk with my colleague about contributing https://github.com/CapPow, and see what he thinks. He's my go to when it comes to iNaturalist and the sciences in general, and I need to know more about what we need. Personally, I would like to see the module cover what is left of the iNaturalist API (I am tempted to tackle this), but I will need to look at your code and get an idea of how long it would take for me to do. I agree, iNaturalist is an amazing project and Python is too. I am a .NET/enterprise programmer by trade, but I see a ton of researchers using Python, so I think it would be worth the time and effort to implement.

Thanks you all! We'll get back with you soon by email. I will send @niconoe an email with our decision.

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