A few months ago I took part in the NBN R hack-evenings at the University of Sheffield. Unlike everyone else in the room I was coding in python.

There is no python wrapper for the API, so I created one. Feel free to clone and use (and pull requests happily accepted)! An example to illustrate how to use the API is here:

import pynbn
c = pynbn.connect('lionfish_pynbn','password');

sp = c.get_tvk(query='Bombus terrestris') #get the tvk (the "taxon version key" for buff tails)
keys = []
for res in sp['results']:
k = res['ptaxonVersionKey']
keys.append(str(k))
print "%d species match this query string" % len(keys)
print keys
tvk = keys[0]
print "We'll use the first key (%s)" % tvk
#we usually take the first item from this list (advice from the NBN hackday)
obs = c.get_observations(tvks=[tvk], start_year=1990, end_year=2010) #get observations
print "There are %d records for B. terrestris between 1990 and 2010" % len(obs)

I’ll shortly be adding this to pip, so it can be installed with,

pip install pynbn