iNaturalist

iNaturalist is a social networking service of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe.[2][3] iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applications.[4][5] Observations recorded with iNaturalist provide valuable open data to scientific research projects, conservation agencies, other organizations, and the public.[6][7][8] The project has been called "a standard-bearer for natural history mobile applications."[9]

iNaturalist
Type of site
Citizen science
Available in36 languages
OwnerCalifornia Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society
URLinaturalist.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Users1 million total registered users (December 2019)[1]
Launched2008 (2008)
Current statusActive

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.[2] 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.[10] In 2014, iNaturalist celebrated its one millionth observation.[11] In 2017, iNaturalist became a joint initiative between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.[2]

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.[12] 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" (needs identification), 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.[7] 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
Using the iNaturalist app

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.[15][16]

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.[17] Seek incorporates features of gamification, such as providing a list of nearby organisms to find and encouraging the collection of badges by doing so.[18] Seek was initially released in the spring of 2018.[17] Both apps are free software released under the MIT license.[19] Automated species identification is included in both apps.[20][18]

Automated species identification

In addition to observations being identified by others in the community, iNaturalist includes an automated species identification computer vision tool.[21] Images can be identified via an artificial intelligence model which has been trained on the large database of the observations on iNaturalist.[22] A broader taxon such as a genus or family is typically provided if the model cannot decide what the species is. If the image is of a little-observed species, one hard to identify from images alone, or it 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 guesses to be most likely is at the top of the list.

Participation

As of 17 November 2020, iNaturalist users contributed over 61,970,000 observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide, with around 200,000 users active in the previous 30 days.[23] iNaturalist is the preferred application for crowd-sourced biodiversity data in Mexico and southern Africa.[8][24]

Users have created and contributed to tens of thousands of different projects on iNaturalist.[23][25] 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.[26][27][28] Other project types include collections of observations by location or taxon, or documenting specific types of observations such as animal tracks and signs,[29] the spread of invasive species, roadkill,[30] fishing catches, or discovering new species.[15] 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.[31] 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.[26] In 2017, the United Nations Environment Programme teamed up with iNaturalist to celebrate World Environment Day.[32]

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. 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.[33] In 2017, the challenge expanded to 16 cities across the United States and collected over 125,000 observations of wildlife in 5 days.[34] 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.[27] In 4 days, over 17,000 people cataloged over 440,000 nature observations in urban regions around the world.[35] 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.[27] Although fewer observations were documented during the 2020 City Nature Challenge, more cities and people participated and more species were found than in previous years.[36]

References
  1. "Year On iNaturalist 2019". iNaturalist. Retrieved 2020-01-03.
  2. "About". 5 August 2013. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  3. "San Francisco's Parks Scoured in Wildlife Inventory". 7 May 2014. Retrieved 31 January 2015.
  4. "iNaturalist application (Google Play)". 4 June 2013. Retrieved 7 August 2013.
  5. "iNaturalist application (iTunes Store)". 25 June 2013. Retrieved 7 August 2013.
  6. "Encyclopedia of Life and iNaturalist work together to support citizen science". 18 June 2012. Retrieved 7 August 2013.
  7. Bowser, A., Wiggins, A., Shanley, L., Preece, J., & Henderson, S. (2014). "Sharing data while protecting privacy in citizen science" (PDF). Interactions. 21 (1): 70–73. doi:10.1145/2540032.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. Pimm, S. L.; Jenkins, C. N.; Abell, R.; Brooks, T. M.; Gittleman, J. L.; Joppa, L. N.; Raven, P. H.; Roberts, C. M.; Sexton, J. O. (2014). "The biodiversity of species and their rates of extinction, distribution, and protection" (PDF). Science. 344 (6187): 1246752. doi:10.1126/science.1246752. PMID 24876501.
  9. Goldsmith, G. R. (6 August 2015). "The field guide, rebooted". Science. 349 (6248): 594. doi:10.1126/science.aac7810.
  10. "California Academy of Sciences Acquires iNaturalist". 14 May 2014. Archived from the original on 17 May 2014. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
  11. Hance, Jeremy (November 10, 2014). "Citizen scientist site hits one million observations of life on Earth". Mongabay.
  12. "Help". iNaturalist.org. Retrieved 21 June 2019.
  13. "Seek by iNaturalist on the App Store". App Store. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
  14. "App: Seek". Google Play. Retrieved 2019-05-26.
  15. "Managing Projects". inaturalist.org. 2018-10-05. Retrieved 2018-10-05.
  16. Drury, Jonathan P.; Barnes, Morgan; Finneran, Ann E.; Harris, Maddie; Grether, Gregory F. E. (2019). "Continent-scale phenotype mapping using citizen scientists' photographs". Ecography. Retrieved 13 September 2020.
  17. "Seek App - iNaturalist.org". iNaturalist.org. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
  18. Elbein, Asher (2018-03-21). "This New App Is Like Shazam for Your Nature Photos". Earther. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
  19. iNaturalistAndroid, INaturalistIOS, SeekReactNative on Github
  20. Jabr, Ferris (2017-12-06). "Letter of Recommendation: iNaturalist". New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
  21. "iNaturalist Computer Vision Explorations". iNaturalist.org. 2017-07-27. Retrieved 2017-08-12.
  22. "Frequently Asked Questions - Computer Vision". iNaturalist. Retrieved 28 December 2020.
  23. "iNaturalist.org Stats". inaturalist.org. 13 September 2020. Retrieved 17 November 2020.
  24. "Citizen science". biodiversityadvisor.sanbi.org. Retrieved 2018-10-05.
  25. "Projects". inaturalist.org. 28 January 2017. Retrieved 28 January 2017.
  26. Seltzer, Carrie (2016-08-25). "Citizen scientists give NPS 100,000+ biodiversity records for 100th birthday". National Geographic Society (blogs). Retrieved 2016-09-17.
  27. "citynaturechallenge.org". 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2019.
  28. Catling, Paul M.; Kostiuk, Brenda; Heron, Jennifer; Jimenez, Runel; Chapman, Monique; Gamiet, Sharmin; Sterenberg, Velma (5 June 2018). "Highlights from the Northwest Territories BioBlitzes". The Canadian Field-Naturalist. 131 (4): 386. doi:10.22621/cfn.v131i4.2099.
  29. "North American Animal Tracking Database". inaturalist.org. 2018-10-05. Retrieved 2018-10-05.
  30. "Adventure Scientists Wildlife Connectivity Study". inaturalist.org. 2018-10-05. Retrieved 2018-10-05.
  31. Holtz, Debra Levi (October 10, 2011). "Reptile, amphibian BioBlitzes tap social media". San Francisco Chronicle.
  32. "App brings marvels of tech and nature together to keep the world connected". worldenvironmentday.global. Archived from the original on 2017-10-19. Retrieved 2017-05-16.
  33. "City Nature Challenge 2016 iNaturalist Project". 2018. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
  34. "City Nature Challenge 2017 iNaturalist Project". 2018. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
  35. Higgins, Lila (4 May 2018). "City Nature Challenge 2018: A Win For Urban Nature Around the World". Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County.
  36. Young, Alison; Higgins, Lila; Jaecker-Jones, Amy (4 May 2020). "City Nature Challenge RESULTS". Retrieved 13 September 2020.
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