iNaturalist Observations Scraper - Wildlife Data with Species, Photos & GPS

Scrape wildlife observations from iNaturalist by search query and get clean, structured biodiversity records: scientific species name, common name, taxonomic rank, iconic taxon, observation date, quality grade, place name, GPS latitude/longitude, observer, photo URL with attribution, identification and comment counts, license and permalink.

No API key. No login. No proxy required. The actor talks to the public iNaturalist API v1 directly and runs fine on plain datacenter IPs, so a run costs you essentially just compute.

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What this iNaturalist scraper does

iNaturalist is the world's largest citizen-science platform for nature observations - hundreds of millions of records of plants, insects, birds, fungi, mammals and reptiles, each with a photo, a location and a community-verified identification. This actor turns any search query into an analysis-ready dataset.

Give it a query like monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, Quercus or red fox, and it returns one row per observation, deduplicated across queries, ready to export as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Features

• Search by anything - common names, scientific names, genera, families or place words.
• Real GPS coordinates - latitude/longitude resolved from the API's geojson payload (obscured records for threatened species correctly return null instead of a fake point).
• Photos with attribution - direct photo URL plus the CC attribution string, so you stay license-compliant.
• Species-level taxonomy - scientific name, common name, rank and iconic taxon (Insecta, Aves, Plantae, Mammalia ...).
• Data-quality signals - quality_grade (research / needs_id / casual), identification count and comment count let you filter down to research-grade records only.
• Multi-query runs - pass a whole list of species and get one merged, deduplicated dataset.
• Permissive output schema - never fails a run because a field arrived as a different type.

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Pricing

Roughly $0.50 per 1,000 observations in Apify platform usage. There are no third-party API fees, no proxy costs and no subscription - iNaturalist's API is free and open.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	observations	What to scrape. Currently observations - wildlife records with species, photo, location and observer.
queries	array	["monarch butterfly", "red fox"]	Free-text search terms. Common names, scientific names, genera or places. Each is scraped separately, duplicates removed.
maxItems	integer	100	Max observations to push across all queries. Max 1000 per run.

Example input

{
  "mode": "observations",
  "queries": ["monarch butterfly", "Danaus plexippus", "red fox"],
  "maxItems": 500
}

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Output

One dataset item per observation. Every field is nullable.

{
  "id": 385922230,
  "species": "Danaus plexippus",
  "common_name": "Monarch",
  "rank": "species",
  "iconic_taxon": "Insecta",
  "observed_on": "2026-07-28T00:00:00",
  "created_at": "2026-07-28T07:32:43-04:00",
  "quality_grade": "needs_id",
  "description": null,
  "place": "Ohio, US",
  "latitude": 40.4612448671,
  "longitude": -81.4414084526,
  "observer": "jonesy5",
  "observer_name": null,
  "photo_url": "https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/706562729/square.jpg",
  "photo_attribution": "(c) jonesy5, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)",
  "identifications_count": 0,
  "comments_count": 0,
  "license": "cc-by-nc",
  "url": "https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/385922230",
  "source": "inaturalist",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T11:38:43.755205+00:00"
}

Field reference

Field	Meaning
id	iNaturalist observation ID
species	Scientific name of the identified taxon
common_name	Preferred common name
rank	Taxonomic rank (species, genus, family ...)
iconic_taxon	High-level group (Insecta, Aves, Plantae, Mammalia ...)
observed_on	When the organism was observed (ISO-8601)
created_at	When the record was uploaded (ISO-8601)
quality_grade	research, needs_id or casual
description	Observer's notes, capped at 2,000 characters
place	Human-readable place guess
latitude / longitude	Decimal GPS coordinates, null when obscured
observer / observer_name	Contributor login and display name
photo_url / photo_attribution	First photo and its CC attribution
identifications_count	Number of community identifications
comments_count	Number of comments
license	Observation license code (e.g. cc-by-nc)
url	Permalink to the observation
source	Always inaturalist
scraped_at	Run timestamp (UTC, ISO-8601)

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Use cases

• Biodiversity monitoring - track where a species is being recorded and how sightings shift across seasons and years.
• Citizen science - pull community-contributed records for a region, a bioblitz or a school project without touching the API yourself.
• Ecology datasets - build species occurrence tables with coordinates for range mapping, habitat modelling and invasive-species tracking.
• ML training data - harvest labelled wildlife photos with species names, ranks and licenses for computer-vision datasets.
• Conservation reporting - filter to quality_grade = research for verified records suitable for publications and grant reports.
• Journalism & content - illustrate stories about local wildlife with properly attributed, openly licensed photos.

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Notes & limits

• iNaturalist caps deep pagination at 10,000 results per query (page × per_page). For bigger harvests, split your search into narrower queries.
• Coordinates for threatened or user-obscured observations are intentionally withheld by iNaturalist and come back as null.
• Photos are user-contributed and licensed individually - always respect the license and photo_attribution fields when republishing.

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Related actors

• GBIF Scraper - global biodiversity occurrence records from the GBIF network.
• Earthquake Scraper - real-time seismic event data.
• Air Quality Scraper - air pollution and AQI measurements by location.
• Openverse Media Scraper - openly licensed images and audio.

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Data source & attribution

Data comes from the public iNaturalist API v1. Observations and photos belong to their individual contributors under the licenses reported in each record. This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by iNaturalist or the California Academy of Sciences.