iNaturalist is a citizen science project and online social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applications. Observations recorded with iNaturalist provide valuable open data to scientific research projects, conservation agencies, other organizations, and the public. The project has been called "a standard-bearer for natural history mobile applications."
History
iNaturalist.org began in 2008 as a UC Berkeley School of Information Master's final project of Nate Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda. Nate Agrin and Ken-ichi 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. The organization merged with the California Academy of Sciences on April 24, 2014. In 2014, iNaturalist celebrated its one millionth observation. In 2017, iNaturalist became a joint initiative between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.
Observations
The iNaturalist platform is based on crowdsourcing of observations and identifications. An iNaturalist observation records an encounter with an individual organism at a particular time and place. In addition to recording actual audio and photos of the organism, an iNaturalist observation may also record evidence of an organism, such as animal tracks, nests, and scat. However, 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 private. On iNaturalist, other users add identifications to each other's observations in order to confirm or improve the "community identification." Observations are classified as "casual," "needs ID", or "research grade" based on the quality of the data provided and the community identification process. "Research grade" observations are incorporated into other online databases such as The Global Biodiversity Information Facility. 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.
Platforms
Users can interact with iNaturalist in several ways:
On the iNaturalist.org website, visitors can search the public data set and interact with the individuals adding observations and identifications. The website provides tools for registered users to discuss and confirm organism identifications. Users can also create project pages to recruit participation in and coordinate work on their topics of interest. On the primary iNaturalist mobile app, registered users can contribute nature observations to the public, online dataset. Seek, which was designed for children and families, requires no online account registration and all observations may remain private. Automated species identification is included in both apps. Seek incorporates features of gamification, such as providing a list of nearby organisms to find and encouraging the collection of badges by doing so. Seek was initially released in the spring of 2018. Both apps are free software released under the MIT license.
Automated species identification
In addition to observations being identified by others in the community, iNaturalist includes an automated species identificationcomputer vision tool. Images can be identified via an artificial intelligence model which has been trained on the large database of the "research grade" observations on iNaturalist. A broader taxon such as a genus or family is typically provided if the model cannot decide what the species is. If the image has poor lighting, is blurry, or contains multiple subjects, it can be difficult for the model to determine the species and it may decide incorrectly. Multiple species suggestions are typically provided; the suggestion that the software believes to be most likely is at the top of the list.
Participation
, iNaturalist users contributed over 41,800,000 observations of plants, animals, and other organisms worldwide, with around 150,000 users active in the previous 30 days. iNaturalist is the preferred application for crowd-sourced biodiversity data in Mexico and southern Africa. Users have created and contributed to thousands of different projects on iNaturalist. 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. Other project types include collections of observations by location or taxon, or documenting specific types of observations such as animal tracks and signs, the spread of invasive species, roadkill, fishing catches, or discovering new species. 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. 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. In 2017, the United Nations Environment Programme teamed up with iNaturalist to celebrate World Environment Day.
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. 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. In 2017, the challenge expanded to 16 cities across the United States and collected over 125,000 observations of wildlife in 5 days. The challenge 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. In 4 days, over 17,000 people cataloged over 440,000 nature observations in urban regionsaround the world. In 2019, the challenge once again expanded. This time 159 cities were involved, and 35,126 participants were engaged in collecting 963,773 observations of over 31,000 species.
