INaturalist

iNaturalist
Type of site
Citizen science
Available in56[1] languages
Area servedWorldwide
Founder(s)
  • Ken-ichi Ueda
  • Nate Agrin
  • Jessica Kline
URLinaturalist.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
UsersIncrease 7.6 million registered users (May 2024)[2]
Launched2008; 16 years ago (2008)
Current statusActive

iNaturalist is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe.[3][4] iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applications.[5][6] iNaturalist includes an automated species identification tool, and users further assist each other in identifying organisms from photographs and even sound recordings. As of 25 December 2024, iNaturalist users had contributed approximately 222,324,751 observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide, and 290,007 users were active in the previous 30 days.

iNaturalist describes itself as "an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature," with its primary goal being to connect people to nature.[7] Although it is not a science project itself, iNaturalist is a platform for science and conservation efforts, providing valuable open data to research projects, land managers, other organizations, and the public.[7][8] It is the primary application for crowd-sourced biodiversity data in places such as Mexico, southern Africa, and Australia,[9][10][11] and the project has been called "a standard-bearer for natural history mobile applications."[12] Most of iNaturalist's software is open source.[13] Scientists have published more than 4,000 papers drawn from iNaturalist data sets and observations,[14] including descriptions of species new to science and rediscoveries of species so rarely seen they were feared extinct.

History

iNaturalist began in 2008 as a UC Berkeley School of Information Master's final project of Nate Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda.[3] Agrin and Ueda continued work on the site with Sean McGregor, a web developer. In 2011, Ueda began collaboration with Scott Loarie, a research fellow at Stanford University and lecturer at UC Berkeley. Ueda and Loarie are the current co-directors of iNaturalist.org.[3] The organization merged with the California Academy of Sciences on April 24, 2014.[15] In 2017, iNaturalist became a joint initiative between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.[3]

Since 2012, the number of participants and observations has roughly doubled each year.[16] In 2014, iNaturalist reached 1 million observations[17] and as of October 2023 there were 181 million observations (163 million verifiable).[note 1][18]

On 11 July 2023, iNaturalist became registered as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.[19]

Platforms

Man in baseball cap in a prairie taking a photo of a pink wildflower with his smartphone
Taking a photo of Asclepias amplexicaulis (clasping milkweed) for iNaturalist
iNaturalist website screenshot with photo of a pink flower on left and details with a map on the right
Screenshot of an observation at iNaturalist.org with CC-BY photo license type indicated

Users can interact with iNaturalist in several ways:

Seek's home page, showing local species and the Challenge for November 2021.

On the iNaturalist.org website, visitors can search the public dataset and interact with other people adding observations and identifications. The website provides tools for registered users to add, identify, and discuss observations, write journal posts, explore information about species, and create project pages to recruit participation in and coordinate work on their topics of interest.[22][23][24]

On the iNaturalist mobile app, registered users can create and share nature observations to the online dataset, explore observations both nearby and around the world, and learn about different species.[22][25]

Seek by iNaturalist, a separate app marketed to families, requires no online account registration and all observations may remain private.[26] Seek incorporates features of gamification, such as providing a list of nearby organisms to find and encouraging the collection of badges and participation in challenges.[27] Seek was initially released in the spring of 2018.[26]

Observations

The iNaturalist platform is based on crowdsourcing of observations and identifications. An iNaturalist observation records a person's encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and place.[22] An iNaturalist observation may also record evidence of an organism, such as animal tracks, nests, or scat. The scope of iNaturalist excludes natural but inert subjects such as geologic or hydrologic features. Users typically upload photos as evidence of their findings, though audio recordings are also accepted, and such evidence is not a strict requirement. Users may share observation locations publicly, "obscure" them to display a less precise location or make the locations completely private.

On iNaturalist, other users add identifications to each other's observations in order to confirm or improve the identification of the observation.[22] Observations are classified as "Casual", "Needs ID" (needs identification), or "Research Grade" based on the quality of the data provided and the community identification process.[22] Any quality of data can be downloaded from iNaturalist and "Research Grade" observations are often incorporated into other online databases such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Atlas of Living Australia.[8][28]

Automated species identification

In addition to observations being identified by others in the community, iNaturalist includes an automated species identification tool, first released in 2017.[29] Images can be identified via a computer vision model which has been trained on the large database of the observations on iNaturalist.[22] Multiple species suggestions are typically provided with the suggestion that the software guesses to be most likely is at the top of the list. A broader taxon such as a genus or family is commonly provided if the model is unsure of the species. It is trained once or twice a year, and the threshold for species included in the training set has changed over time.[30] It can be difficult for the model to guess correctly if the species in question is infrequently observed or hard to identify from images alone; or if the image submitted has poor lighting, is blurry, or contains multiple subjects.

Projects

Using the iNaturalist app

Users have created and contributed to tens of thousands of different projects on iNaturalist.[18][31] The platform is commonly used to record observations during bioblitzes, which are biological surveying events that attempt to record all the species that occur within a designated area, and a specific project type on iNaturalist.[32][33][34] Other project types include collections of observations by location or taxon or documenting specific types of observations such as animal tracks and signs,[35] the spread of invasive species, roadkill,[36] fishing catches, or discovering new species.[23] In 2011, iNaturalist was used as a platform to power the Global Amphibian and Global Reptile BioBlitzes, in which observations were used to help monitor the occurrence and distribution of the world's reptiles and amphibian species.[37] The US National Park Service partnered with iNaturalist to record observations from the 2016 National Parks BioBlitz. That project exceeded 100,000 observations in August 2016.[32] In 2017, the United Nations Environment Programme teamed up with iNaturalist to celebrate World Environment Day.[38]. In 2022, Reef Ecologic teamed up with iNaturalist to celebrate World Oceans Day.

City Nature Challenge

Main article: City Nature Challenge

In 2016, Lila Higgins from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Alison Young from the California Academy of Sciences co-founded the City Nature Challenge (CNC). In the first City Nature Challenge, naturalists in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area documented over 20,000 observations with the iNaturalist platform.[39] In 2017, the CNC expanded to 16 cities across the United States and collected over 125,000 observations of wildlife in 5 days.[40] The CNC expanded to a global audience in 2018, with 68 cities participating from 19 countries, with some cities using community science platforms other than iNaturalist to participate.[33] In 4 days, over 17,000 people cataloged over 440,000 nature observations in urban regions around the world.[41] In 2019, the CNC once again expanded, with 35,000 participants in 159 cities collecting 964,000 observations of over 31,000 species.[33] Although fewer observations were documented during the 2020 City Nature Challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic (when the CNC became collaborative as opposed to competitive), more cities and people participated, and more species were found than in previous years.[42]

Licensing

Users have the option to license their observations, photos, and audio recordings in several ways, including for the public domain, Creative Commons, or with all rights reserved. To encourage the sharing of information and to reduce costs, iNaturalist encourages users to license media with Creative Commons licenses.[43] The default license is CC BY-NC,[43] meaning others are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the media as long as appropriate credit is given, changes are indicated, a link to the license is provided, and it is not used for commercial purposes.[44]

Observations and media licensed with Creative Commons licenses are often shared elsewhere, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (excluding share-alike and no derivatives licenses),[45] Atlas of Living Australia,[46] and Wikipedia (excluding noncommercial and no derivatives licenses)[47] through regular imports[22][46] or user scripts such as iNaturalist2Commons[48] and Wiki Loves iNaturalist.[49]

The iNaturalist website and mobile apps are open-source software released under the MIT License.[13][50]

Changing the iNaturalist default licence (CC BY-NC)

The default licence on iNaturalist is Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0). This means that most iNaturalist photographs can be copied for almost any purpose provided the photos are not used for commercial purposes.  However, if images are to be used in Wikipedia, licensing must be changed to either CC-BY 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0. To change the licensing using a computer, the iNaturalist account holder must

  1. Log into his/her iNaturalist account.
  2. Find the rightmost symbol in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
  3. Click the down arrow and select “Account settings”.
  4. Choose “Content & Display”.
  5. Scroll down to “Licensing”.
  6. There are three sections to be changed:

Default observation license, Default photo license and Default sound license, each with 8 alternatives.

  1. The recommended choice is Attribution (CC-BY). AND tick the check box!
  2. Once Default observation license, Default photo license and Default sound license have all been changed, click on the “SAVE SETTINGS” button on the lower right-hand side.

Images which may be shared across GBIF need to be licensed using one of the following licences: CC0, CC-BY 4.0 or CC BY-NC, that is, the CC-BY-SA default licence will not permit images to be accessible via GBIF.  Therefore, for images to be shared to GBIF and to be able to be used in Wikipedia, a CC-BY 4.0 licence is necessary.

Research

As of January 2024, more than 4,000[14] research papers have been published that cite the iNaturalist research-grade observations hosted on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), often in the fields of ecology, conservation, and climate change.[51] Many articles focus on climate-driven range shifts and expansions. For example, in 2015, data from iNaturalist was used to show that the Hopkin's rose nudibranch (Ceratodoris rosacea) is moving northward.[52]

Discovery and rediscovery

Other published research focuses on the description of new species or rediscovery of species previously considered extinct. For example, a species of snail, Myxostoma petiverianum, first described in the 1700s, was also rediscovered in Vietnam.[53] Additionally, in 2013, a citizen scientist in Colombia uploaded a photo of a poison dart frog, which researchers determined was a previously unrecognized species now known as Andinobates cassidyhornae.[54][55] In 2023, a species of mantis first discovered with the aid of iNaturalist was named Inimia nat so that its abbreviated form, I. nat, would be a word play that pays homage to iNaturalist.[56]

The first-ever wild-specimen photograph of the New Britain goshawk was posted to iNaturalist in March 2024.[57] The Columbian weasel, the rarest neotropical carnivore, was seen for the first time in the 21st century when an iNaturalist user uploaded snapshots of the weasel exploring a privy.[58] Two teenagers in California used iNaturalist observations of unfamiliar scorpions as the first step in their eventual description of two new species.[59] The frosted phoenix moth of New Zealand, feared extinct, was "rediscovered" when a Swedish birder who was in town to see kiwis put up a light to attract moths and snapped a casual photo of an insect that had parked itself under a lawn chair on his hotel balcony; his upload to iNaturalist was the first time the moth had been seen alive in 65 years.[60] A commuter in London uploaded an observation of an insect on her bag to iNaturalist, which allowed it to be identified as a plane lace bug, Corythucha ciliata. This was the first recorded observation of the invasive species in the United Kingdom in about 18 years, and the observation sparked a national monitoring campaign to determine the spread of the insect in the country.[61]

Morphology

Other research has focused on the morphology or coloration of species observations. For example, a study in 2019 assessed the relationship between wing coloration and temperature in the dragonfly species Pachydiplax longipennis.[62]

Graphs

  • Semi-log plot of annual changes in number of species observed (in thousands; green) and number of verifiable[note 1] observations (in millions; black).
    Semi-log plot of annual changes in number of species observed (in thousands; green) and number of verifiable[note 1] observations (in millions; black).
  • Relative proportions of verifiable[note 1] observations according to taxonomic group as of January 2022
    Relative proportions of verifiable[note 1] observations according to taxonomic group as of January 2022

Notes

  1. ^ a b c On iNaturalist, an observation is "verifiable" if it has no penalties in its Data Quality Assessment. Observations lacking a date, location, or media are automatically penalised, and users may grant penalties if they deem that the date or location is inaccurate, that there is no evidence or no recent evidence of an organism, or that the organism is not wild. Non-verifiable observations are hidden from view by default, unless expressly enabled.

References

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