iNaturalist is a platform and social network where people can share observations of biodiversity and crowdsource identifications. By early 2020, the iNaturalist community of over 800,000 people had already contributed over 30 million verifiable occurrence records representing over 250,000 species from every country in the world. iNaturalist records are presence-only data (like virtual museum specimens) collected under a variety of circumstances and motivations. Anyone on iNaturalist can add identifications (at any taxonomic level) or annotations such as life stage or flowering phenology. There are over 50,000 projects created on iNaturalist for the purposes of encouraging new citizen science observations of interest and/or aggregating existing iNaturalist data.
Through crowdsourcing observations with photo or audio evidence as well as crowdsourcing identifications, iNaturalist facilitates the sharing of expertise across borders and with new nature enthusiasts. Through its broad reach, in 2019 the number of observations doubled from 15M to 30M. Anyone with an account has the power to help correct or flag errors. The data that emerge from this collective effort allow anyone to explore the basic questions of what species have been found where and when via the iNaturalist interface, as well as more complex analyses via data exports. iNaturalist data is accessible directly from iNaturalist and also via external data partners such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (gbif.org).
Results/Conclusions
Thanks to millions of identified photos, iNaturalist trained a computer vision model to give taxon suggestions based on an image and location. For novices wanting to know “what is this?”, the model suggestions can be a starting place for further exploration. It has also been used as a gamified exploration tool in the app Seek by iNaturalist. Other groups are also using iNaturalist’s high-quality image dataset to train models for other purposes. We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible with such extensive collections of biodiversity images.
The presentation will also cover examples of ecological research on phenology, phenotypic variation, behavior, and conservation that incorporate iNaturalist data in different ways. For external use, iNaturalist data can be accessed via: 1) csv exports; 2) the iNaturalist API; 3) GBIF; or 4) other external data partners such as members of the international iNaturalist Network. Thanks to the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) provided by GBIF for downloads and their citation tracking system, we know that iNaturalist data has contributed to more than 440 peer-reviewed articles and over 100 other publications via GBIF alone.