6 ms·
iNaturalist
- halapro 7mo agoI must say, the homepage simple style is extremely pleasing. I was always a fan of Metro UI and this perfectly matches it.
- simonw 7mo agoThe 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/ 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%22taxonId%22%3A123829%2C%22taxonName%22%3A%22California%20Brown%20Pelican%22%2C%22days%22%3A%2230%22%7D https://tools.simonwillison.net/species-observation-map#%7B%... )
- andrewpedelty 7mo agoI 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.
- Tomte 7mo agoSeek 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.
- bluebarbet 7mo ago>Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away. Frustration shared.
- throwanem 7mo agoSo the modal is doing its job.
- bluebarbet 7mo agoSure, it's "doing its job" much in the way a podcast advert you've already heard 1000 times is "doing its job".
- throwanem 7mo agoI keep hearing people speak so positively of "friction," lately, and yet. Some more nuance required in that discussion, I think.
- virgil_disgr4ce 7mo agoMaking the user completely inured to its message is not doing its job
- andrewpedelty 7mo agoThat's great to know, I'll give it a shot for sure.
- zem 7mo agowow, that would be my cue to uninstall the app and write zeros repeatedly over the place it used to be!
- ingonealan3 7mo agoThis guy deletes!
- GorbachevyChase 7mo agoI’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.
- chhxdjsj 7mo agoI stopped using seek and just started using gemini…
- Galanwe 7mo agoMy son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !
- jw_cook 7mo agoIt 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 https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist
- martior 7mo agoAnd 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 https://name-the-beast.skabb.com
- simonw 7mo agoOK 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.
- martior 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- is_true 7mo agoMaybe add the etymology of the words as clues would help
- 9dev 7mo agoIncredible. 7 owls near me! Thank you both for this, love it very much.
- moritzwarhier 7mo agoI 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!
- alejandrorivas 7mo ago[flagged]
- Litost 7mo agoI 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-in-biological-recording-data-flow/ 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???
- noisy_boy 7mo agoLove 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.
- two-sandwich 7mo agoThis 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!
- justonceokay 7mo agoThis 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.
- daemonologist 7mo agoiNaturalist is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if they released their models.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- frontierkodiak 7mo agoSee my other comment in this thread! I've got you covered; launching open models in ~1month. Happy to answer any questions!
- contingencies 7mo agoDo 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).
- frontierkodiak 7mo agoApologies; I do not mean to imply any affiliation.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo agoSimilar category: Merlin Bird ID [1]. Uses audio to identify the birds around you. [1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/ https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
- derwiki 7mo agoAaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo
- JumpCrisscross 7mo agoThe 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.
- xandrius 7mo agoYeah, 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
- ajkjk 7mo agoEven if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite things I've ever watched.
- bix6 7mo agoBest movie of the year hands down
- ajitid 7mo agoWhat a great documentary! Loved the pace of the documentary and the mix of visuals. Thanks for sharing.
- skyberrys 7mo agoI 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)
- jw_cook 7mo agoI've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.
- contingencies 7mo agoYet 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.
- Taipan_Enigma 7mo agoAre 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.
- jw_cook 7mo agoIMO it's best-in-class. The next best thing might be google's speciesnet: https://github.com/google/cameratrapai https://github.com/google/cameratrapai
- rafram 7mo agoAny idea how SpeciesNet and iNat’s model compare to BioCLIP 2? https://huggingface.co/imageomics/bioclip-2 https://huggingface.co/imageomics/bioclip-2
- 7mo ago
- dmvjs 7mo ago[dead]
- bluebarbet 7mo agoAlso: WhoBird. A decent bird ID app that has the merit of being FOSS and available on F-Droid.
- lanfeust6 7mo agois there any FOSS app for plants?
- lucb1e 7mo agoThis 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!
- Beestie 7mo agoThis 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.
- ray__ 7mo agoI 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.
- lithocarpus 7mo agoYeah.. 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.
- jayknight 7mo agoIt 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.
- rwoll 7mo agoStrava (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.
- whateveracct 7mo agoDoes 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"
- the_real_cher 7mo agoThis is like pro spider league.
- preuceian 7mo agoI’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?
- jw_cook 7mo agoBoth iNaturalist and Observation.org publish observation data to GBIF: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7 https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425... https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f641165 https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f6...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- coalteddy 7mo agoDoes 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
- noahgolmant 7mo agoYou 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.
- coalteddy 7mo agoThanks for those pointers! Very helpful.
- jw_cook 7mo agoPoints 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/assets/javascripts/inaturalist/map3.js.erb https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass... https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/assets/javascripts/jquery/plugins/inat/taxonmap.js.erb https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass... https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/assets/javascripts/wax.g.js https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...
- coalteddy 7mo agoDid not realize that they publish their code. Very cool. Thanks!
- butlike 7mo agoOk the little infographic that shows "how it works" looks like the cloudflare warning when cloudflare can't connect to the host.
- FLGMwt 7mo agothat'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.
- gardnr 7mo agoA 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.
- Modified3019 7mo agoI 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.
- jw_cook 7mo agoiNaturalist 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 https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about [2] https://github.com/pyinat/naturtag https://github.com/pyinat/naturtag
- djeastm 7mo agoNot to be confused with iNaturist...
- alejandrorivas 7mo ago[flagged]
- jmusall 7mo agoHaven'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/ https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/ [2] https://floraincongita.com/ https://floraincongita.com/ [3] https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10676 https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10676 [4] https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13611 https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13611
- tamimio 7mo agoMerlin, ebird, rock identifier, and inaturalist are some of the great apps to use while out in nature.
- mlrtime 7mo agoSame, but I use birdnet-go. For anyone who has cameras outside with a rtsp stream, it is incredibly easy to setup a real-time bird monitor around your property. It's amazing what species it will detect every day. I'm looking for the same thing for insects but haven't found one. I want to know all the things I'm hearing.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tagami 7mo agoI have a friend that works there. They recently posted a few open positions: User Insights and Analytics Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/kwwnthztts https://app.beapplied.com/apply/kwwnthztts Technical Delivery Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/ppeyvinuw4 https://app.beapplied.com/apply/ppeyvinuw4
- anotheryou 7mo agohow does it compare to obsidentify? (same doxxing problem there) does it allow to save observations without publishing? want a pokedeck
- Evidlo 7mo ago> 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
- pvillano 7mo agohttps://www.instagram.com/inaturalistshitpost/ https://www.instagram.com/inaturalistshitpost/
- WaitWaitWha 7mo agois 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?
- ivanstepanovftw 7mo agoiNaturalist - dataset collection project
- NkWsy 7mo agoThe 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 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 https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wild-mile-chicago
- samwesl 7mo agoi know this guy and the app is great, feels like pokemon for animals in chicago
- rglover 7mo agoThis is a great app. Helped me ID some ink caps growing on a bale of hay in my backyard recently.
- wdutch 7mo agoI 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.
- theden 7mo agoFor 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-death-cap-poison-mushrooms-fungimap-erin-patterson/105505976 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-07-10/inaturalist-d... https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/05/09/the-citizen-science-app-playing-an-unlikely-role-in-the-erin-patterson-mushroom-murder-trial.html https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/05/09/the-c...
- wanderr 7mo agoI 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.
- malomalsky 7mo agoI built trmnl plugin over this api! https://github.com/Malomalsky/trmnl-inat-nearby-live-intl https://github.com/Malomalsky/trmnl-inat-nearby-live-intl It shows new creatures around you
- jccalhoun 7mo agoI didn't know they had a map feature. I zoomed in on my neighborhood and... all the pins are mine :-P
- jimjeffers 7mo agoWe use iNaturalist to curate eDNA observed results on https://ednaexplorer.org https://ednaexplorer.org
- abetusk 7mo ago"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 https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/terms
- nosrepa 7mo agoI regularly use their seek app to identify plants and insects.