Different results between get_inat_obs() and iNaturalist explore page

[kang37]

I am trying to download observations by research areas. I found the results of get_inat_obs() is different from the results of iNaturalist explore page searching.
Take a island (Yakushima island in Japan) as the example. If we use the function, we get the following results. There are 32 observations covering 31 species in 2022, the numbers become 8 and 8 when we only keep the research grade data.

# Get all the observation data in 2022. 
obs_yakushima_2022 <- get_inat_obs(
  query = "Yakushima, Kagoshima, Japan", year = 2022, maxresults = 10000
)
nrow(obs_yakushima_2022)
# 32
length(unique(obs_yakushima_2022$scientific_name))
# 31

# If we only want the research grade data. 
obs_yakushima_2022_research <- get_inat_obs(
  query = "Yakushima, Kagoshima, Japan", year = 2022, quality = "research", 
  maxresults = 10000
)
nrow(obs_yakushima_2022_research)
# 8
length(unique(obs_yakushima_2022_research$scientific_name))
# 8

However, if we do the inquiry on iNaturalist explore page, we get 163 observations covering 118 species in 2022. If we filter the data to keep the research grade data, we have 73 observations, covering 55 species.

Is there anyway to get the observation data of the iNaturalist explore pages?

[jwidness]

Just in case this is still useful to anyone, rather than put the place in the query param, you should use either bounds with coordinates, or the place_id.