Type of site Citizen science Commercial No | Website inaturalist.org Registration required | |
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Available in English, Spanish, Galician, Catalan, and Basque Owner California Academy of Sciences | ||
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. Observations may be added via the website or from a mobile application. The observations provide valuable open data to a variety of scientific research projects, museums, botanic gardens, parks, and other organizations. Users of iNaturalist have contributed over four million observations since its founding in 2008, and the project has been called "a standard-bearer for natural history mobile applications."
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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. On April 24, 2014 iNaturalist.org merged with the California Academy of Sciences In 2014, iNaturalist celebrated its one millionth observation.
Participation
The iNaturalist platform is based on crowdsourcing of data. Users of iNaturalist can submit observations of organisms in the form of photographs, sound recordings, or visual sightings. Observations are either "casual" or "research" grade, and research grade observations are incorporated into online databases to be utilizable for scientists. iNaturalist is the preferred application for crowd-sourced biodiversity data in Mexico.
As of 28 January 2017, the iNaturalist community consisted of almost 400,000 users contributing over 4,300,000 observations of plants, animals, and other organisms worldwide. Users have created and contributed to over 9000 different projects, spanning hundreds of themes.
Project examples include taxa- and location-specific bioblitzes, roadkill observations, animal tracks, and documenting the spread of invasive 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 2011 iNaturalist was used as a platform to power concurrent 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.