How about adding a link to download CSV file of complete search results? This should be easy on the bandwidth, and then give people a starting checklist for their downloads.

Leta,

Good points. There are hardware and performance limits which prevent us from returning more than 1500 species at a time in this version of the Species Distribution Grid website. The good news is that we are currently redeveloping that site. Thank you for your suggestions which will be forwarded to our development team to be considered for future revisions to our website(s). So your comment is right on time! Glad to hear that you were able to get your data.

I am referring to the limit of seeing 50 records at a time in the results table, and ancillarily, the artificial limit of 150 files to download at a time. Here I mean artificial in that it does not correspond to any biological taxonomies, although your IT staff likely find it a pleasing number in terms of bandwidth :)

The Context: On the Species Distribution Grids downloads page, select Advanced, tick Class, then select Aves for Class. Tick all the threat status boxes. Click on Class Query. The resulting table indicates that 1,005 species were found. The pull-down box that reads "Display" defaults to 10 rows, but can be increased to 20, 30, or 50. Changing it to 50, the table reloads and you see that the species are found on 21 pages. As there is a limit of 150 files to be downloaded at a time, if you were to need all three file types for all birds, that would be 21 downloads as there are 150 potential file downloads per page. If you only needed shapefiles, for example, you could select "Check All" in the column header for Shape on 3 different pages, then Create Grid Download file to zip up these 150 files. However, you can still only see 50 rows at a time in the results table.

I would have liked to download all 1,005 species at once for all three types. There is less of a chance for missing files. If your team is dead set on the 150 file at a time limit, then how about adding 150 to the Display drop down box? That way if you need only one file type, then it would be fewer downloads needed. I would actually like to see "All" listed so I can save a copy of the complete results table in one go, instead of copying and pasting it together 50 records at a time from the results table or from the CSV file in the zipped download. I have a handy Chrome extension that will let me copy table contents to my clipboard. This way I will have a checklist up front to make sure I don't miss any files by missing a tick box on Threat Status or not realizing I clicked on page 12 when I meant to be downloading the results on page 13.

I've already gotten my data, so these suggestions are mostly to help out other researchers. I have another comment about some missing files, but will post that separately.