iNaturalist

Thank you to those who created this wonderful app!! The ability to identify (and thereby learn) about the flora and fauna we humans are so lucky to find all around us is a dream come true! We share this beautiful* planet with such a stunning variety of life... To be able to learn about the animals, plants, fungi & more which we see around us is a gift! * It’s precisely this amazing variety of life, in all it’s forms, which is the source of our planet’s beauty . I hope this app will give more people pause & encourage them to give thought to that which is necessary to preserve & to keep this amazing planet & ALL it’s inhabitants healthy. Whether initially inspired by “selfish” reasons i.e., “what do I need to do to preserve this perfect home for the future of my children, grandchildren & the generations to come within my own family ” OR inspired by more “altruistic” reasons: what must I do and what must we do to keep this miracle of a planet healthy for the sake of the planet and all its inhabitants as a whole… In the end both groups will find that the true and lasting answers to these questions lead them down the same path. By necessity this includes learning about life all around you and how to best keep it healthy. This app provides a great service to that very end.

I’m just a 20 year old that wants to know what every creatures purpose is around me and this has been the most fun way to do it. There are no ads, you upload a picture of the animal of reasonable quality, it helps if there’s multiple pictures and you describe what you saw in the description area. You put your location, which can be moved around so that your location isn’t known. It’s important to note that the location is key in determining a species sometimes so be decently accurate on the location. Once you’ve done that, AI, that’s right, artificial intelligence studies the pictures and compares them to other picture alike and species in the area to often give you a suggestion that’s correct or another 10 suggestions below of which I usually find the species I’m looking for if it’s not too obscure. I’ve also contributed to the knowledge of where some species are which feels great. My only complaint is there’s no place to provide feedback but here and the upload speed is reasonably slow. But this is a wonderful app that I recommend for any biologist. Yes, you can submit species under the microscope, too!!!! Thank you California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society for helping create this app!!!

I love inat. I use it all the time. The taxonomy suggestions are almost always on point. I use it to explore areas I already am familiar with too to learn about the things living around me I’ve never heard of. Even the projects and guides are cool, because I can see which species in a group are most commonly encountered based on how many times they’ve been observed compared to others. The range maps you get for species etc are dynamic. BUT, the social component to me is abysmal. “Leaderboard?” No one cares. It’s a meaningless statistic. I’d like to be able to see who is observing similar things to me in an area. Who is consistently identifying a specific phylum or genus? (Not me lol). They should be acknowledged as someone with some knowledge in that area. I know inat has powerful algorithms capable of identifying species based on photos - use some of those algorithms to connect peoples’ observational powers and curiosity. Sometimes I observe something that scientist haven’t completely determined what subspecies lives in my specific area- why can’t scientists send out questions for people to find out? Don’t know the southernmost extent of a plant? Ask people who have observed it before and live in the area to look for it. This is a powerful app for taking citizen science to the next level. I’d love to see what they can do.

I really love this app and use it pretty much daily since I’ve downloaded it. It’s great to have with you to quickly identify a species using the picture instead of having to go and google the characteristics of what you saw and hope it knows what you mean. I would like to see them update it with a section where you can go to a person’s profile and see all of their observations in one place like the way you view a project and all of its observations. Perhaps even add an option to follow a particular person and then see all the observations of people you follow in a feed. You can do kinda already do this but you have to search for the person and then be confined to whatever given map area you have on your screen. I think it would be better to have all of them on one page because sometimes I come across an observer whose observations I like (camera quality, focus on a specific species, or just like their observations) and I want to see all of them. Also, they should add a place where you can view all of the observations you’ve added to your favorites.

If I could, I would marry this app. iNat is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have learned so much and have met so many amazing people through this app. Before iNat, I was the weird person who liked bugs. With iNat, I have slowly blossomed into an amateur subject matter expert documenting previously unknown behaviors/species relationships/coloration variations and submitting specimens to university entomological collections. I went from not being able to tell the difference between rice stink bugs and brown stink bugs one year ago to knowing hemipteran scientific names better than the common ones. Sure, iNat didn't do that in and of itself, but it facilitated my self-education and gave me the means to organize my data/photographs, and my competitive nature motivates me to go out and DOCUMENT ALL THE THINGS! The iNat people are continually improving their platform, and this mobile version is the best yet. The photo suggestion tool is amazing and sorely needed. Not perfect, but it's THE BEST version of photo ID out there and I'm frankly amazed by how good it is.