iNaturalist

We use iNaturalist to curate eDNA observed results on https://ednaexplorer.org

The iNaturalist API is an absolute gem. It doesn't require authentication for read-only operations and it has open CORS headers which means it's amazing for demos and tutorials.

My partner and I built this website with it a few years ago: https://www.owlsnearme.com/

(I realize this is a bit on-brand for me but I also use it to track pelicans https://tools.simonwillison.net/species-observation-map#%7B%... )

I love this app, but it's also a significant doxxing risk especially for the large number of non-technical users that it has. A quick look at the map reveals the home addresses and names of many iNaturalist users in my neighborhood, lots of them older folks that probably don't realize that adding all of the neat wildlife that they see in their backyard (or uploading things they see on remote hikes without any 3G coverage once their phone connects to their home wifi network) is also putting their home address on display by adding a cluster of photos right next to their house that are all attached to their account.

Haven't tried iNaturalist yet, but I love Merlin Bird ID [1] and Flora Incognita [2]. The latter seems to be exceptionally accurate (over 80% up to 98% depending on the dataset) [3]. They also expose an API for "registered external clients" [4], but so far I sadly wasn't able to find any further documentation on it.

A problem I often have with Merlin is that the birds seem to know when I record them, and promptly stop singing...

[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

[2] https://floraincongita.com/

[3] https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10676

[4] https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13611

Similar category: Merlin Bird ID [1]. Uses audio to identify the birds around you.

[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

I didn't know they had a map feature. I zoomed in on my neighborhood and... all the pins are mine :-P

This was a lifesaver around 2020 for me, documenting local critters and chatting about them. I've had immense satifaction in sharing my excitement for wildlife with others.

Great app, easy interface, friendly community. Thank you iNaturalist team!

This site was helpful in documenting the spread of lantern flies (invasive critters that damage trees on the U.S. East Coast) - the more folks that report sightings (of anything not just problem critters) the better for all concerned.

Conversely, its also beneficial to report sightings of helpful bugs/birds/bats/etc. so can get an early warning when a population starts to thin out.

For those that don't know, Erin Patterson (the mushroom murderer in Australia) allegedly used iNaturalist to find the poisonous mushrooms

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-07-10/inaturalist-d...

https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/05/09/the-c...

Does anyone know how they make their map so performant? Showing all those pins is mind blowing to me coming from leaflet maps. Marinetraffic is also a map that blows me away every time i see all the icons and how smooth and fast the loading is when zooming in. Would love to make a similar map at some point for my hobby but leaflet just does not cut it when you want to render 10million plus pins on a global map.

Tech blogs or pointers would be great

I send things too iNaturalist all the time, it's great, it really helped me learn about my local fauna. I want to do a project with their API to identify a couple hundred wildflower photos I've been hoarding. Would that work? ( Idea is my wildflower app could send to their models to confirm my original identification)

I built trmnl plugin over this api! https://github.com/Malomalsky/trmnl-inat-nearby-live-intl It shows new creatures around you

I have a friend that works there. They recently posted a few open positions:

User Insights and Analytics Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/kwwnthztts

Technical Delivery Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/ppeyvinuw4

The Inat API is so great. We use it on our chicago river cameratrap ID site to get species info and eventually upload results to it. Once we filter out the millions of Chicago Geese. https://rangers.urbanrivers.org/cameratrap.

Plus having a project is cool to see other observations in a given ecological area https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wild-mile-chicago

I wish there was some kind of desktop application that I could sit down and locally organize my data into, allowing me to keep a full quality source while syncing a copy to naturalist for others to benefit from.

As it stands, I don’t really have a system in place, and I don’t want to put a lot of effort into a lossy (assets get compressed and stripped of metadata) online project.

I must say, the homepage simple style is extremely pleasing. I was always a fan of Metro UI and this perfectly matches it.

iNaturalist is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if they released their models.

I love iNaturalist! It's the closest thing to real-life Pokemon I know of. A friend of mine has uploaded several observations that turned out to be new to science.

A genuinely good-for-the-world project. The data is really useful for science and for machine learning. You can export all the research-grade identifications of fungi to train a classifier; if that’s what you’re into.

I’ve been using Observation.org (or rather its localized version Waarneming.nl) to record my hedgehog sightings. Should I use both platforms, or do these data points end up aggregated downstream anyway?

> it has open CORS headers which means it's amazing for demos and tutorials.

The fact that this even exists is so sad. CORS is such an ill-conceived idea

This is a great app. Helped me ID some ink caps growing on a bale of hay in my backyard recently.

Ok the little infographic that shows "how it works" looks like the cloudflare warning when cloudflare can't connect to the host.

Also: WhoBird. A decent bird ID app that has the merit of being FOSS and available on F-Droid.

is there a way to migrate findings from Seek to iNaturalist? I do not want to start from scratch.

Also I am unclear as far as the app. Is it F/LOSS? If so, why is it not on other repos like F-Droid?

how does it compare to obsidentify? (same doxxing problem there)

does it allow to save observations without publishing? want a pokedeck

I am a huge fan of iNaturalist and the concept of citizen science. I am into herping, birding and scuba diving and I post pretty much all of my photos there. I have about 5000 observations and am approaching 2000 species. I have a private "project" with some good friends. Some of my observations are incredibly rare and one of them was even featured on their social media.

While I started using iNaturalist initially to satisfy my own curiosity about the animals and fungi I was seeing, and then expanded my usage to contribute to science in some small way, a huge unexpected benefit has been having my photos catalogued and findable by species, family, date or location. If I want to show a friend the monitor lizards I saw fighting over a huge fish in Thailand, I can find it no problem even if I don't remember exactly when that was. If I want to show someone all the cool frogs I saw in Indonesia, easy. If I can't remember where it was that I encountered a gray fox casually strolling down the trail, I can find it. Google photos and other AI tagging solutions are never going to be accurate and detailed enough to be useful in this way.

It is really an amazing tool with a shockingly friendly, welcoming and helpful community, in stark contrast with the eBird community which I find is quite unwelcoming to beginners. For example, if you make a questionable ID on iNaturalist, folks from the community will suggest what they think it might be. If you claim a rare bird on eBird you can expect a gruff email demanding evidence, or you may have it removed from your list pre-emptively. That experience may not be universal, but I have seen it multiple times. Telling people on the internet they are wrong is a favorite activity of many so I really think it's commendable the culture that iNaturalist has been able to foster.

For those who don't know, iNaturalist was created by and remained a part of the California Academy of Science until relatively recently when they were spun off into their own nonprofit entity.

For a while now the long term vision, product and engineering decisions they are making have been a bit questionable to me. The web version feels like abandonware and has some very clunky experiences. The iOS and Android apps function differently and have separate longstanding bugs, don't support all the functionality of the web version, and are also mostly abandonware while the eng team focuses on a new app that is a rewrite. Seek feels like it's trying to be Pokémon. iNat next, the new version of the iNaturalist app, has a nicer look and feel but seems like it will be released missing functionality both from the old apps and from the website.

I am not sure how important my own gripes are as a power user, perhaps in the end it will be better for new users, but it sort of feels like iNaturalists goals as an organization may not be as aligned with the original charter as they once were. For the purposes of financial stability it is probably most important to grow the user base. For the purposes of supporting citizen science initiatives it's probably more important to grow geographic distribution and the number and diversity of observations submitted, so a more balanced approach to growing the user base and supporting power users (and converting new users into power users) would probably be the approach more aligned with their original goals.

iNaturalist - dataset collection project

This is like pro spider league.

Not to be confused with iNaturist...

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