inaturalist-mcp-server

Look up annotation attributes/values, quality grades, licences, ranks, iconic taxa, and conservation codes before filtering; unknown values can silently return nothing. Conservation codes are the normalised csi filter, distinct from authority-specific taxon status text. With topic controlled_terms and taxon_id, also return observed annotation usage and counts.

Resolve organism, place, project, or observer names to identifiers. Taxon lookup matches word starts within a name, not only its beginning; other types use cross-kind search with limited spelling tolerance. Without page, candidates retain relevance order. Explicit taxon pages browse name matches in ascending taxon-ID order; this can differ from autocomplete matching across languages. A miss returns found false with recovery guidance.

Resolve a place name to a place id, or list places covering a map area. Pass q to match a display-name prefix or all analyzed query terms within it, or all four of nelat, nelng, swlat and swlng for a map area — exactly one of the two, never both. Each result carries its bounding box, place type, and containment chain. Upstream serves at most 20 places per list and may omit more.

Search georeferenced wildlife sightings by area, date, taxon, quality grade, annotation, conservation status, observer, project, and licence. Returns a projected record per sighting with coordinates, licence, first photo, and identification counts. An area is given in exactly one form — place_id, the lat/lng/radius triple in kilometres, or a four-corner bounding box — and defaults to research-grade, wild-only records, which are echoed back on every call. Identifications and comments are deliberately not expandable here (one thread is 28 KB); fetch them for specific records with inaturalist_get_observation. page walks the first 10,000 results under any ordering; past 10,000, order by id descending (order_by "id", order "desc") and pass each page’s next_cursor as cursor.

Fetch up to 10 distinct observations by id with their community identification thread — who identified what, whether each identification agrees, and the consensus taxon the community landed on. The whole attempted batch costs one upstream request. Records come back in requested order; remaining distinct ids are deferred for another call with the same include. Missing attempted ids appear in unresolved; the call fails only when nothing resolved and no deferred work remains. Long threads and observation-field lists share a response budget across resolved records — up to 40 entries per array for one record, 4 for a full batch — and every record reports the size of each array beside what it kept.

Rank leaf taxa recorded in an area and period, most-observed first. Includes hybrids and coarser identifications; subspecies roll up to their species. An area is given in exactly one form: place_id, the lat/lng/radius triple in kilometres, or a four-corner bounding box. Narrow to a clade by passing taxon_id, e.g. the birds of a park, or to one observer or one project by user_id, user_login, or project_id. Defaults to research-grade, wild-only records and echoes those defaults back. For the most active people rather than the most recorded taxa, use inaturalist_get_leaderboard.

Build a phenology histogram for a taxon in an area — which months, weeks, or years it is recorded in. The default month_of_year interval answers "when does this bloom or appear here" in twelve buckets; absolute intervals (year, month, week, day, hour) bucket real dates and disclose their window start. An area is given in exactly one form: place_id, the lat/lng/radius triple in kilometres, or a four-corner bounding box. Omit taxon_id to chart every taxon in the area. Narrow to one life stage or reproductive state with an annotation pair (term_id and term_value_id, e.g. Life Stage = Larva, or Flowers and Fruits = Flowers), or to broad groups with iconic_taxa. Defaults to research-grade, wild-only records and echoes those defaults back.

Rank the most active observers or identifiers for an area, period, and taxon — who knows this place or this group. kind selects which: observers are ranked by how many observations they recorded, identifiers by how many identifications they made. An area is given in exactly one form: place_id, the lat/lng/radius triple in kilometres, or a four-corner bounding box. Both endpoints rank only the top 500 entries, so page multiplied by per_page must stay at or below 500 — narrow the area, period, or taxon to bring someone further down into reach. For the most-recorded species rather than the most active people, use inaturalist_get_species_counts.

List related taxa ranked by observations carrying current identifications of both taxa. This is co-identification evidence, not a directional correction count or an exhaustive list of visually similar organisms. Scope it to an area in exactly one form (place_id, the lat/lng/radius triple in kilometres, or a four-corner bounding box), or leave the area off for global results. The taxon must be a genus or finer (genus, species, or below). Resolve the organism name to a taxon id with inaturalist_resolve_name first.

Fetch a taxon profile: the taxonomic path, per-authority conservation listings, the encyclopedia summary, the photo gallery, immediate children, and observation counts. Resolve a name to a taxon id with inaturalist_resolve_name first. The upstream record is 95 KB for a common species, so it is projected before anything else happens; a taxon that still overflows comes back as an outline of its sections with their byte sizes, and naming those sections in a re-call returns only those. The valid section names are summary, taxonomy, children, conservation, photos, and encyclopedia.