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.
I also love the Seek app that they provide (maybe this overlaps with the linked app in functionality?). As someone who's grown fonder of Nature in general over the last decade but who has little actual knowledge of the regional flora and fauna, it's a great way to engage with the plants and little bugs in my garden (or others' while on walks and such).
Fun to travel and "pokemon" some new local stuff too.
Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away. Usually at that point the bird has gone away, too.
The iNaturalist app doesn‘t. It has more features, but Seek‘s former advantage „let me just the a photo and auto-identify“ is now in the iNaturalist main app, as well, so it is my default now.
I’ve been pretty disappointed in the seeks applications ability to identify vegetation or insects. It seemed like it was really good a year or two ago and now I just seem to get so many bad predictions.
I use iNaturalist semi-regularly and was about to start using it for a rewilding project I'm involved in, so looked into that and some of the alternatives.
I really like how easy it is to use, the various views on the data (incl. geofenced projects and places), the fact you can export it all back out again, the volunteer and "AI" assist on IDing stuff etc.
But I guess the main other pro for me was that, in the UK at least, most of the data I've put into iNaturalist that's made Research Grade has also been imported into iRecord and NBNAtlas which wouldn't happen the other way round, so 3 for the price of 1. See
https://nbn.org.uk/inaturalistuk/inaturalistuk-and-its-place...
I know there's various grumblings about observation quality from iRecord users relating to iNaturalist records, but I'm assuming this is people just not following the published guidance???
I got 0/4 though on the easiest difficulty level. Feature request: a version where you have to guess the common name instead, I think that would still be fun.
Yeah, I should do some more here, also let you pick families, or at least some pre-selected ones like birds, animals, plants. But there is so much more you can do, like spotted around me, or where I am going on vacation.
It is a gem. There are all kinds of fun location/organism-specific tools you can put together with the public read-only data, and owlsnearme is a good example of that. I just used it to check my area and learned there are snowy owls nearby, which is new to me!
The iNat API certainly has some quirks and shortcomings, but in terms of usability it's uncommonly good compared to most biodiversity platforms. I maintain the python API client[1], which is used for data visualizations, doing useful things with your own observation data (which is how I got into it), Jupyter notebooks, Discord bots, and some research/education workflows.
I once used it to check whether it would identify some birds that are prevalent in my area.
Not related to the app's fubctionality, but it was pretty funny when I replayed my recording of parrot noises to crop it and the next moment, a walnut shell dropped from the tree above.
Love the owl website. Feedback/suggestion: when I clicked on use my location, it should show me all matches in a given radius of that location instead of waiting for me to fill something in the search box. The browser asked for permission and I allowed to share my location.
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.
I can hide my home-based observation locations, but others usually do not. People who post observations in my front yard cause other iNat users to visit. This hasn't been a problem in that there have been only a few additional visitors, and they are friendly. Still, I don't like my yard being publicized.
People who walk by the yard might tell their friends, but ordinary word-of-mouth can't be queried online. Not yet.
EDIT: We did have what turned out to be a significant invasive species observation. It was published in my SO's account with the location obscured. I looked up the species online and realized it might be a concern, so I killed it and put it in the freezer. In the meantime, the California Agricultural Inspectors got wind of it and contacted iNat to obtain the email address associated with the account. After making contact, they sent someone to pick up my specimen, and the later, 4 inspectors (yes, really, 3 inspectors and a supervisor) were sent to look for additional specimens. None were found.
Unrelated to this incident, I posted endangered species (not on our property) in my account, and iNat automatically obscures the location. Later on, I got an ~~email~~ message via iNat from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife asking for access to the precise locations, which I gladly provided.
I didn't mean to suggest that iNat is proactive, they may well be.
IIRC, the exact chain of events was: Invasive Species Observation posted -> a curator at the LA Natural History saw the post and notified the CDFA (Agriculture Inspectors) -> CDFA contacts iNat to get email address -> CDFA contacts my SO. I don't recall whether iNat had a built-in messaging service at the time (they do now).
Regarding endangered species, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife evidently joined iNaturalist, in part to enhance their data collection. They seem to be monitoring iNaturalist and contacting users who have relevant observations. They seem very sensitive to privacy concerns, and cooperation is voluntary. I'm thrilled a state agency is engaging the public in protecting our natural resources.
hey, iNat eng here, just want to chime in that this is all great feedback!
here's [1] some extra info on iNat's current geoprivacy treatment and [2] guidance on how to configure this for our different platforms for individual `Observations` (our core domain entity to which geo is attached).
I'll at least share that this is on our radar to look at, but I wouldn't expect changes in the next few months. For now, we still want your observations, but if this is a concern you have, please take a look at the geoprivacy settings!
handling this concern is on our radar but I can't speak to delivery timeline. It my involve timed "obscured" windows (obscure things for this hiking weekend) and/or user-configurable geofences (obscure observations around my home but not anywhere else).
we _also_ want to respect the geoprivacy of wildlife: sometimes observations generate _problematic_ attention. For sensitive species, we want people to report them, but we don't want to be complicit in or responsible for interested people flocking to the observation and potentially spooking the observed species.
Maybe not, but I'd want to know beforehand either way. And looking through accounts near me suggests that a fair number of users add enough detail to make me think that they don't realize that their info is so public (selfies/profile pictures being the most problematic example imo).
Yah, this is what I do, however I think this is what GP is talking about when they say savvy (or maybe I'm flattering myself). Plenty of folks with their full details on their profile.
I have my house covered in observations and it would not take a rocket scientist to figure out where I live. I'm also a big believer in accurately tagging observations with locations of things in case someone else wants to try to find it. If someone wants to come to my house and take pictures of spring tails they're welcome to lol
I feel like this ship has already sailed. The home addresses of most people, especially if they have lived in the same place for awhile, is already online. In my case, even my salary info is online because I am a public employee.
100%; absolutely. Search your name and an old (or current) email address on any search engine. Prepare to be horrified when you see address, DOB, social media presence, etc. for you AND YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY neatly linked together.
One people search engine had ALL of my emails and screen-names, even the ones I created with my first Internet account as a kid in 1996. Wild stuff.
I mean I do agree, and on iNat I can clearly see my house and the house of a few other people in the neighborhood. However you can easily find the current owner information for a given house in the state I live in, and since we bought the house, our name.
I guess it is different once you look at people renting, and also you could track a specific person posts to see when they are posting away from home for example. But as far as revealing your home address, sadly there are many other ways in a lot of cases
Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of this, the default should be low precision location data with a random offset per item + random offset per user.
It has options to hide or obscure the location, which I use whenever I'm anywhere near my house, but it should be a little better about prompting users to use that.
Strava (a running tracking app) provides two helpful controls you can set as your default:
1. “Hide the start and end points of activities that start at SPECIFIC addresses.”
2. “Hide start and end no matter where they happen.”
Then it can be useful to add your home/work/routine locations.
If iNaturalist doesn’t have a setting like that, it’s a nice approach — especially if it’s included as part of initial onboarding flow — so it helps people without needing to remember to make visibility choices each time.
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...
> The process of generating this data is labor intensive, because it requires sound ID experts to listen to each audio file carefully.
Oh man. This is THE ONLY REASON why AI at scale works...and it's entirely powered by extremely repetitive classification done by people in third-world countries (for now; there are similar jobs in US and Canada for harder domains like math and law). It's definitely the biggest reason why autonomous driving works.
(Cornell, who maintains Merlin, probably has students do it, though I know there is data crowdsourcing in the app too.)
As far as I understand it, classification data is basically the Brent crude of the AI industry (well that and the datasets used for training LLMs).
It paid well for the area until the company that spun up these services decided to move operations to SEA to save on cost. I'll try and link to it if I can find it.
Thanks for sharing this. I love Merlin but never knew how they got it to be so good. Blood, sweat, and tears - of course - as everything actually valuable and useful requires.
I've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet connection to do the identification and sometimes that is dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)
I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.
Requiring an internet connection for a nature app is absurd. As annoying as it is I get why a big tech company like Google fails at this sort of thing, many of their employees probably never leave a city and so the products always work well for them. But a nature app has no excuse, normal usage will get blocked by that all the time.
That's what Merlin is for but it's a ~450mb install. BirdNet is only a ~30MB install and birds are everywhere, so what's wrong with having an online option for most people who spend most of their time within range of a cel tower?
Merlin is great for identifying birds, but I could never understand how to just post the information to the community for them to verify the observation. Compared to Seek / iNaturalist I find the uploading process complicated and I still have no idea how to do it.
The funny thing is I got into birds because of the app. I hike alone often. Identifying the bird and then challenging myself to identify it correctly from memory going forward (before double checking with the app) is a fun game that draws one into the environment. Then, once you remember the bird (or, in my case, whatever nickname I came up with) you start learning and remembering facts about the bird.
Yeah, birding can be such fun once you have a small repertoire of birds under your belt. Some people get that from their culture or family but I didn't, so made a little game to get me going.
It's so satisfying to hear/see a bird and actually have a chance at getting it right
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 app sparked a kind of existential change for me, also during the pandemic. I realized taking these long walks around Seattle that I didn’t know almost any of the plants. The “ah ha” moment was that I realized at any point almost 50% of my visual field was dominated by things I didn’t even know the names of. As a curious engineer this is not acceptable.
So I would take walks and try to identify any plant I didn’t know. The first day I didn’t even make it around the block. Over the course of moths I got better and could go a few miles before spotting a (native) plant I had no idea about. Now I know when most flowers bloom, what’s wdible, what’s poisonous, what’s related, and it’s fun to share with other plant people too.
Seattle is such a beautiful place to learn about plant life, since it is so temperate the city is like a world tree museum. Almost any kind of tree that doesn’t prefer desert will grow here and people over the centuries have planted many unique and exotic varieties.
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.
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.
Points are rendered server-side, backed by Elasticsearch, and served as PNG tiles for each zoom level. Individual markers are only rendered for small sets. Some of the relevant source code:
Looked at their source code out of curiosity. They use Elasticsearch as a geo backend, tile server that renders PNG images server side for each map tile request.
- low zoom -> server aggregated grid
- high zoom -> switcher to point tiles
browser just displays images, there is no work to do on client side..
You may want to look into the PMTiles format and tippecanoe. It efficiently produces pyramidal XYZ tile overviews of vector data. Sometimes this is also done server side via the PostGIS asMVT ffunction, or Martin.
For client side rendering, deck.gl is quite good, also a newer library called lonboard from DevelopmentSeed.
"Unless you specify otherwise when you post Content, you agree to license Content you contribute to the Platform under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC)." [0]
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)
Hey, good news! Pollination ecologist + ML guy here; with open models coming soon.
You can keep an eye on (gh) polli-labs/linnaeus (a bit stale; I'll rebase on my private repo later tonight-).
There's some cool ideas in here to exploit the structure of taxonomic hierarchies to help the model approach recognition how a professional taxonomist might.. so working from coarse to fine, taxonomy-guided label smoothing (distributing alpha mass by taxonomic distance)..and (forthcoming) RL on expert consensus to teach abstention (if an expert could only identify a specimen to genus for some set of inputs; then our model should abstain from a species classification for the same inputs).
Unfortunately I am very, very compute-constrained- but shooting for late April/first week of May for insect + flowering plant models. (Other taxa will come later; probably as unified model).
I'm working on camera-based (automated) ecological monitoring systems for ~6yrs at this point; it's a really fun problem space! dropped out of grad school to go all-in on automating my favorite job I ever had (pollination ecology field research..watching flowers for visitations!); since I knew I'd always be a mediocre ecologist- but an engineer that happens to care about ecology could be very very valuable to my field.
a taxa recognition model turns out to be only a small piece of the system you need to extract structured observational data from cameras in the field :-)
Working with one of my partners right now to launch a really cool demo of what's possible these days- Texas folks especially; keep an eye out on wildflower.org around May 1!
I'll spill more ink soon but (anyone) please get in touch if you find these things interesting. Or if you'd like to help me out with compute/expenses!
This project looks awesome pollination ecologist + ML guy! I starred it and will definitely be exploring using this. I'm actually pretty simple with my needs because I'm after only a few specific wildflowers not the whole ecosystem. But of course it's impressive how comprehensive your project is looking.
Are their models considered to be the best or is there some competition? For plant identification, they blow every other free app I have tried out of the water. It also seems to return the genus of a plant rather than misidentify the species which I find impressive.
That's too bad, maybe I can upload it to iNaturalist then reference the entry there. I don't mind if it's duplicated, I just want to be able to improve the location data without sharing the improved location data so publicly.
Yet they shelter under a 'Science' tax-break. It's duplicitous. They should publish their models and build process. If it's not available for replication, it's not science.
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.
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 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.
iNaturalist would agree with you; they explicitly say[1] it's not meant to be the primary source for your photos. Users generally fall into a couple broad camps:
1. Mostly use the mobile app, and take photos and upload observations directly from there. Local photo collection either isn't a priority or is backed up by their phone's cloud sync.
2. Mostly use inaturalist.org via a desktop browser, with either a standalone digital camera or mobile photos synced to desktop. Local filesystem (hopefully plus backups) is the source of truth.
I have been working on a desktop application[2] with a long-term goal of full bidirectional sync, and a secondary goal of offline usage. The current feature set is fairly modest and read-only, though, focusing on organizing local photos using data from iNat.
Do you work for iNaturalist? If so, please clarify if this commitment is official and whether it includes the full build process to achieve replicable builds and input data not just a build artifact (which would not be replicable, and therefore not be Science under iNaturalist's public interest Science tax-shelter status).
This is the only app of this kind that is simple enough for my grandma to use it and that works offline.
Birdnet iirc has separate recording, selecting, uploading, and results steps, which I tried to teach but it's too much. iNaturalist confuses even me about what buttons I'm supposed to be pressing if I just want to know what plant I'm looking at and not upload whatever (meta)data about me and my device to whatever (public?) database. Definitely recommend anyone to check out Whobird if you just want a simple, offline solution for bird sounds!
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.
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?
that's funny because we _just_ introduced cloudflare.
it's not my wheelhouse, but it would be comedic so let me know if you get the legit cloudflare host connection warning _and then_ land on the how it works that you mentioned looks like cloudflare.
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 was created by and remained a part of the California Academy of Science
I'm not sure that's the case, my impression was they simply took funding from and sheltered under the CAS until they split off to their own organization.
In their new independent structure they're claiming to be a public interest science non-profit, but as they don't publish their models or model-building-process, it's non-replicable, so in my view it's not Science, and the public never gets their hands on the product.
it sort of feels like iNaturalists goals as an organization may not be as aligned with the original charter as they once were
As another user who has contributed five digits of observations (over double yours), I couldn't agree more.
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 also love the Seek app that they provide (maybe this overlaps with the linked app in functionality?). As someone who's grown fonder of Nature in general over the last decade but who has little actual knowledge of the regional flora and fauna, it's a great way to engage with the plants and little bugs in my garden (or others' while on walks and such).
Fun to travel and "pokemon" some new local stuff too.
Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away. Usually at that point the bird has gone away, too.
The iNaturalist app doesn‘t. It has more features, but Seek‘s former advantage „let me just the a photo and auto-identify“ is now in the iNaturalist main app, as well, so it is my default now.
>Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away.
Frustration shared.
So the modal is doing its job.
Sure, it's "doing its job" much in the way a podcast advert you've already heard 1000 times is "doing its job".
I keep hearing people speak so positively of "friction," lately, and yet. Some more nuance required in that discussion, I think.
Making the user completely inured to its message is not doing its job
wow, that would be my cue to uninstall the app and write zeros repeatedly over the place it used to be!
This guy deletes!
That's great to know, I'll give it a shot for sure.
I’ve been pretty disappointed in the seeks applications ability to identify vegetation or insects. It seemed like it was really good a year or two ago and now I just seem to get so many bad predictions.
I stopped using seek and just started using gemini…
I use iNaturalist semi-regularly and was about to start using it for a rewilding project I'm involved in, so looked into that and some of the alternatives.
I really like how easy it is to use, the various views on the data (incl. geofenced projects and places), the fact you can export it all back out again, the volunteer and "AI" assist on IDing stuff etc.
But I guess the main other pro for me was that, in the UK at least, most of the data I've put into iNaturalist that's made Research Grade has also been imported into iRecord and NBNAtlas which wouldn't happen the other way round, so 3 for the price of 1. See https://nbn.org.uk/inaturalistuk/inaturalistuk-and-its-place...
I know there's various grumblings about observation quality from iRecord users relating to iNaturalist records, but I'm assuming this is people just not following the published guidance???
And I made this silly game. Name the beast, where you get a picture and try to guess (or know) the scientific name. https://name-the-beast.skabb.com
OK I absolutely love that!
I got 0/4 though on the easiest difficulty level. Feature request: a version where you have to guess the common name instead, I think that would still be fun.
Yeah, I should do some more here, also let you pick families, or at least some pre-selected ones like birds, animals, plants. But there is so much more you can do, like spotted around me, or where I am going on vacation.
Maybe add the etymology of the words as clues would help
It is a gem. There are all kinds of fun location/organism-specific tools you can put together with the public read-only data, and owlsnearme is a good example of that. I just used it to check my area and learned there are snowy owls nearby, which is new to me!
The iNat API certainly has some quirks and shortcomings, but in terms of usability it's uncommonly good compared to most biodiversity platforms. I maintain the python API client[1], which is used for data visualizations, doing useful things with your own observation data (which is how I got into it), Jupyter notebooks, Discord bots, and some research/education workflows.
[1] https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist
I know this app!
I once used it to check whether it would identify some birds that are prevalent in my area.
Not related to the app's fubctionality, but it was pretty funny when I replayed my recording of parrot noises to crop it and the next moment, a walnut shell dropped from the tree above.
Animals apparently don't like being recorded!
Love the owl website. Feedback/suggestion: when I clicked on use my location, it should show me all matches in a given radius of that location instead of waiting for me to fill something in the search box. The browser asked for permission and I allowed to share my location.
Incredible. 7 owls near me! Thank you both for this, love it very much.
My son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !
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.
I can hide my home-based observation locations, but others usually do not. People who post observations in my front yard cause other iNat users to visit. This hasn't been a problem in that there have been only a few additional visitors, and they are friendly. Still, I don't like my yard being publicized.
People who walk by the yard might tell their friends, but ordinary word-of-mouth can't be queried online. Not yet.
EDIT: We did have what turned out to be a significant invasive species observation. It was published in my SO's account with the location obscured. I looked up the species online and realized it might be a concern, so I killed it and put it in the freezer. In the meantime, the California Agricultural Inspectors got wind of it and contacted iNat to obtain the email address associated with the account. After making contact, they sent someone to pick up my specimen, and the later, 4 inspectors (yes, really, 3 inspectors and a supervisor) were sent to look for additional specimens. None were found.
Unrelated to this incident, I posted endangered species (not on our property) in my account, and iNat automatically obscures the location. Later on, I got an ~~email~~ message via iNat from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife asking for access to the precise locations, which I gladly provided.
Wow, I didn’t know that iNaturalist was so proactive about that sort of thing. It also sounds like you have a really cool yard! :)
I didn't mean to suggest that iNat is proactive, they may well be.
IIRC, the exact chain of events was: Invasive Species Observation posted -> a curator at the LA Natural History saw the post and notified the CDFA (Agriculture Inspectors) -> CDFA contacts iNat to get email address -> CDFA contacts my SO. I don't recall whether iNat had a built-in messaging service at the time (they do now).
Regarding endangered species, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife evidently joined iNaturalist, in part to enhance their data collection. They seem to be monitoring iNaturalist and contacting users who have relevant observations. They seem very sensitive to privacy concerns, and cooperation is voluntary. I'm thrilled a state agency is engaging the public in protecting our natural resources.
These state employees have indeed been proactive.
What was the invasive species??
That would be doxxing, not that it matters here.
I mean, I can see where you’re coming from but I think it’s a stretch.
hey, iNat eng here, just want to chime in that this is all great feedback!
here's [1] some extra info on iNat's current geoprivacy treatment and [2] guidance on how to configure this for our different platforms for individual `Observations` (our core domain entity to which geo is attached).
I'll at least share that this is on our radar to look at, but I wouldn't expect changes in the next few months. For now, we still want your observations, but if this is a concern you have, please take a look at the geoprivacy settings!
[1]: iNat's geoprivacy explainer https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/1... [2]: platform-specific guidance on configuring geoprivacy for an Observation https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/1...
iNat eng here, non-authoritative rep
handling this concern is on our radar but I can't speak to delivery timeline. It my involve timed "obscured" windows (obscure things for this hiking weekend) and/or user-configurable geofences (obscure observations around my home but not anywhere else).
we _also_ want to respect the geoprivacy of wildlife: sometimes observations generate _problematic_ attention. For sensitive species, we want people to report them, but we don't want to be complicit in or responsible for interested people flocking to the observation and potentially spooking the observed species.
oops, sorry, I double posted this from an edited draft, please see my other comment for more helpful links to actual iNat behavior on this.
Hah. I grew up when everyone had their names in the phone book with phone number and home address. It matters more to some people than others.
In many places home purchases are also public records and sometimes even published in local newspapers (online these days).
In fact, you had to pay extra to have your number/address omitted from the phone book.
Does this matter if my account is some random username about birds?
Like all people learn is "someone does in fact live at that address and they use this app"
Maybe not, but I'd want to know beforehand either way. And looking through accounts near me suggests that a fair number of users add enough detail to make me think that they don't realize that their info is so public (selfies/profile pictures being the most problematic example imo).
Depends on what linking credentials you may have registered with. If they have a data leak, those details will be linked to your address in that way.
Seems pretty unlikely even with a data leak, that someone would go through the effort, but it's worth acknowledging as a vector.
Yah, this is what I do, however I think this is what GP is talking about when they say savvy (or maybe I'm flattering myself). Plenty of folks with their full details on their profile.
Home ownership is in the public record tho, right?
Right, this is true, so it is possible to associate a person to their photos.
My main concern was revealing my home address, however, and I don't believe my actions on iNaturalist allow folks to go from my name to my address.
I have my house covered in observations and it would not take a rocket scientist to figure out where I live. I'm also a big believer in accurately tagging observations with locations of things in case someone else wants to try to find it. If someone wants to come to my house and take pictures of spring tails they're welcome to lol
I feel like this ship has already sailed. The home addresses of most people, especially if they have lived in the same place for awhile, is already online. In my case, even my salary info is online because I am a public employee.
100%; absolutely. Search your name and an old (or current) email address on any search engine. Prepare to be horrified when you see address, DOB, social media presence, etc. for you AND YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY neatly linked together.
One people search engine had ALL of my emails and screen-names, even the ones I created with my first Internet account as a kid in 1996. Wild stuff.
I mean I do agree, and on iNat I can clearly see my house and the house of a few other people in the neighborhood. However you can easily find the current owner information for a given house in the state I live in, and since we bought the house, our name.
I guess it is different once you look at people renting, and also you could track a specific person posts to see when they are posting away from home for example. But as far as revealing your home address, sadly there are many other ways in a lot of cases
Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of this, the default should be low precision location data with a random offset per item + random offset per user.
It has options to hide or obscure the location, which I use whenever I'm anywhere near my house, but it should be a little better about prompting users to use that.
Strava (a running tracking app) provides two helpful controls you can set as your default:
1. “Hide the start and end points of activities that start at SPECIFIC addresses.” 2. “Hide start and end no matter where they happen.”
Then it can be useful to add your home/work/routine locations.
If iNaturalist doesn’t have a setting like that, it’s a nice approach — especially if it’s included as part of initial onboarding flow — so it helps people without needing to remember to make visibility choices each time.
There's an option to obscure the exact location of plants, but it's not obvious.
Wait until you see what happens when you type your address into google earth.
https://youtu.be/xicsyakpIL4
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
Merlin, ebird, rock identifier, and inaturalist are some of the great apps to use while out in nature.
Similar category: Merlin Bird ID [1]. Uses audio to identify the birds around you.
[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
I'm a big fan of Merlin and learning more about its development changed my perspective on software development! I wrote about that here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...
> The process of generating this data is labor intensive, because it requires sound ID experts to listen to each audio file carefully.
Oh man. This is THE ONLY REASON why AI at scale works...and it's entirely powered by extremely repetitive classification done by people in third-world countries (for now; there are similar jobs in US and Canada for harder domains like math and law). It's definitely the biggest reason why autonomous driving works.
(Cornell, who maintains Merlin, probably has students do it, though I know there is data crowdsourcing in the app too.)
As far as I understand it, classification data is basically the Brent crude of the AI industry (well that and the datasets used for training LLMs).
There was a great investigative article done by The Verge that built a piece around interviews of people at a data labelling center in Kenya and other African countries: https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int....
It paid well for the area until the company that spun up these services decided to move operations to SEA to save on cost. I'll try and link to it if I can find it.
Here are similar articles on this topic:
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/china-ai-dominance-relies-on...
- https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-66514287
- https://old.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1r7q...
It's actually insane how sparingly this is discussed when talking about advancements in AI.
Thanks for sharing this. I love Merlin but never knew how they got it to be so good. Blood, sweat, and tears - of course - as everything actually valuable and useful requires.
There's Merlin and then there's Birdnet too https://birdnet.cornell.edu/. Both by Cornell.
I've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet connection to do the identification and sometimes that is dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)
I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.
Requiring an internet connection for a nature app is absurd. As annoying as it is I get why a big tech company like Google fails at this sort of thing, many of their employees probably never leave a city and so the products always work well for them. But a nature app has no excuse, normal usage will get blocked by that all the time.
That's what Merlin is for but it's a ~450mb install. BirdNet is only a ~30MB install and birds are everywhere, so what's wrong with having an online option for most people who spend most of their time within range of a cel tower?
birdnet pi or go run the model locally with an option to push observations back to Cornell
https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi
https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
Tphakala recently also published a cli tool to process recordings, it can also use other models such as Google perch.
https://github.com/tphakala/birda
Merlin is great for identifying birds, but I could never understand how to just post the information to the community for them to verify the observation. Compared to Seek / iNaturalist I find the uploading process complicated and I still have no idea how to do it.
Aaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo
The funny thing is I got into birds because of the app. I hike alone often. Identifying the bird and then challenging myself to identify it correctly from memory going forward (before double checking with the app) is a fun game that draws one into the environment. Then, once you remember the bird (or, in my case, whatever nickname I came up with) you start learning and remembering facts about the bird.
Yeah, birding can be such fun once you have a small repertoire of birds under your belt. Some people get that from their culture or family but I didn't, so made a little game to get me going.
It's so satisfying to hear/see a bird and actually have a chance at getting it right
What a great documentary! Loved the pace of the documentary and the mix of visuals. Thanks for sharing.
Even if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite things I've ever watched.
Best movie of the year hands down
Indispensable app. Works extremely well.
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 app sparked a kind of existential change for me, also during the pandemic. I realized taking these long walks around Seattle that I didn’t know almost any of the plants. The “ah ha” moment was that I realized at any point almost 50% of my visual field was dominated by things I didn’t even know the names of. As a curious engineer this is not acceptable.
So I would take walks and try to identify any plant I didn’t know. The first day I didn’t even make it around the block. Over the course of moths I got better and could go a few miles before spotting a (native) plant I had no idea about. Now I know when most flowers bloom, what’s wdible, what’s poisonous, what’s related, and it’s fun to share with other plant people too.
Seattle is such a beautiful place to learn about plant life, since it is so temperate the city is like a world tree museum. Almost any kind of tree that doesn’t prefer desert will grow here and people over the centuries have planted many unique and exotic varieties.
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...
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.
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
Points are rendered server-side, backed by Elasticsearch, and served as PNG tiles for each zoom level. Individual markers are only rendered for small sets. Some of the relevant source code:
https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...
https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...
https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...
Did not realize that they publish their code. Very cool. Thanks!
Looked at their source code out of curiosity. They use Elasticsearch as a geo backend, tile server that renders PNG images server side for each map tile request.
- low zoom -> server aggregated grid
- high zoom -> switcher to point tiles
browser just displays images, there is no work to do on client side..
I generated a visual schematic how these kind of systems work: https://vectree.io/c/server-side-geo-tile-rendering-elastics...
You may want to look into the PMTiles format and tippecanoe. It efficiently produces pyramidal XYZ tile overviews of vector data. Sometimes this is also done server side via the PostGIS asMVT ffunction, or Martin.
For client side rendering, deck.gl is quite good, also a newer library called lonboard from DevelopmentSeed.
Thanks for those pointers! Very helpful.
"Unless you specify otherwise when you post Content, you agree to license Content you contribute to the Platform under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC)." [0]
[0] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/terms
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)
Hey, good news! Pollination ecologist + ML guy here; with open models coming soon.
You can keep an eye on (gh) polli-labs/linnaeus (a bit stale; I'll rebase on my private repo later tonight-). There's some cool ideas in here to exploit the structure of taxonomic hierarchies to help the model approach recognition how a professional taxonomist might.. so working from coarse to fine, taxonomy-guided label smoothing (distributing alpha mass by taxonomic distance)..and (forthcoming) RL on expert consensus to teach abstention (if an expert could only identify a specimen to genus for some set of inputs; then our model should abstain from a species classification for the same inputs). Unfortunately I am very, very compute-constrained- but shooting for late April/first week of May for insect + flowering plant models. (Other taxa will come later; probably as unified model). I'm working on camera-based (automated) ecological monitoring systems for ~6yrs at this point; it's a really fun problem space! dropped out of grad school to go all-in on automating my favorite job I ever had (pollination ecology field research..watching flowers for visitations!); since I knew I'd always be a mediocre ecologist- but an engineer that happens to care about ecology could be very very valuable to my field.
a taxa recognition model turns out to be only a small piece of the system you need to extract structured observational data from cameras in the field :-) Working with one of my partners right now to launch a really cool demo of what's possible these days- Texas folks especially; keep an eye out on wildflower.org around May 1!
I'll spill more ink soon but (anyone) please get in touch if you find these things interesting. Or if you'd like to help me out with compute/expenses!
This project looks awesome pollination ecologist + ML guy! I starred it and will definitely be exploring using this. I'm actually pretty simple with my needs because I'm after only a few specific wildflowers not the whole ecosystem. But of course it's impressive how comprehensive your project is looking.
I don't know if it will work, but Pl@ntNet Identify (which I use often) seems to have an API: https://docs.plantnet.org/en/reference/api-plantnet/
I've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.
Are their models considered to be the best or is there some competition? For plant identification, they blow every other free app I have tried out of the water. It also seems to return the genus of a plant rather than misidentify the species which I find impressive.
IMO it's best-in-class. The next best thing might be google's speciesnet: https://github.com/google/cameratrapai
Any idea how SpeciesNet and iNat’s model compare to BioCLIP 2?
https://huggingface.co/imageomics/bioclip-2
That's too bad, maybe I can upload it to iNaturalist then reference the entry there. I don't mind if it's duplicated, I just want to be able to improve the location data without sharing the improved location data so publicly.
Yet they shelter under a 'Science' tax-break. It's duplicitous. They should publish their models and build process. If it's not available for replication, it's not science.
We use iNaturalist to curate eDNA observed results on https://ednaexplorer.org
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 know this guy and the app is great, feels like pokemon for animals in chicago
I built trmnl plugin over this api! https://github.com/Malomalsky/trmnl-inat-nearby-live-intl It shows new creatures around you
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 didn't know they had a map feature. I zoomed in on my neighborhood and... all the pins are mine :-P
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.
iNaturalist would agree with you; they explicitly say[1] it's not meant to be the primary source for your photos. Users generally fall into a couple broad camps:
1. Mostly use the mobile app, and take photos and upload observations directly from there. Local photo collection either isn't a priority or is backed up by their phone's cloud sync.
2. Mostly use inaturalist.org via a desktop browser, with either a standalone digital camera or mobile photos synced to desktop. Local filesystem (hopefully plus backups) is the source of truth.
I have been working on a desktop application[2] with a long-term goal of full bidirectional sync, and a secondary goal of offline usage. The current feature set is fairly modest and read-only, though, focusing on organizing local photos using data from iNat.
[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about
[2] https://github.com/pyinat/naturtag
iNaturalist is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if they released their models.
See my other comment in this thread! I've got you covered; launching open models in ~1month. Happy to answer any questions!
Do you work for iNaturalist? If so, please clarify if this commitment is official and whether it includes the full build process to achieve replicable builds and input data not just a build artifact (which would not be replicable, and therefore not be Science under iNaturalist's public interest Science tax-shelter status).
Also: WhoBird. A decent bird ID app that has the merit of being FOSS and available on F-Droid.
This is the only app of this kind that is simple enough for my grandma to use it and that works offline.
Birdnet iirc has separate recording, selecting, uploading, and results steps, which I tried to teach but it's too much. iNaturalist confuses even me about what buttons I'm supposed to be pressing if I just want to know what plant I'm looking at and not upload whatever (meta)data about me and my device to whatever (public?) database. Definitely recommend anyone to check out Whobird if you just want a simple, offline solution for bird sounds!
is there any FOSS app for plants?
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.
I must say, the homepage simple style is extremely pleasing. I was always a fan of Metro UI and this perfectly matches it.
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?
Both iNaturalist and Observation.org publish observation data to GBIF:
https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...
https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f6...
I regularly use their seek app to identify plants and insects.
https://www.instagram.com/inaturalistshitpost/
> 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
Ok the little infographic that shows "how it works" looks like the cloudflare warning when cloudflare can't connect to the host.
that's funny because we _just_ introduced cloudflare.
it's not my wheelhouse, but it would be comedic so let me know if you get the legit cloudflare host connection warning _and then_ land on the how it works that you mentioned looks like cloudflare.
This is a great app. Helped me ID some ink caps growing on a bale of hay in my backyard recently.
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?
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 was created by and remained a part of the California Academy of Science
I'm not sure that's the case, my impression was they simply took funding from and sheltered under the CAS until they split off to their own organization.
In their new independent structure they're claiming to be a public interest science non-profit, but as they don't publish their models or model-building-process, it's non-replicable, so in my view it's not Science, and the public never gets their hands on the product.
it sort of feels like iNaturalists goals as an organization may not be as aligned with the original charter as they once were
As another user who has contributed five digits of observations (over double yours), I couldn't agree more.
how does it compare to obsidentify? (same doxxing problem there)
does it allow to save observations without publishing? want a pokedeck
iNaturalist - dataset collection project
This is like pro spider league.
Not to be confused with iNaturist...
I expected fewer butterflies and more asses.
we can all dream
honestly I can never remember which of these words means which
Consider that nude is short and nature is longer. Naturist is the shorter one and naturalist the longer one