Hello all iNat’ers
with a heavy heard I have to remove myself from here,
In light of the ongoing support by the United States for a terrorist and internationally condemned regime, as well as its involvement in the unprovoked invasion and bombing of a sovereign nation, I no longer, in good conscience, associate myself with any organisation based in the U.S. Recent political developments have only reinforced this decision.
I am therefore looking for an alternative platform to iNaturalist, (I came from iSpot, and it was a very helpful and fun community. However sadly, they moved to this platform and I was not participating here in the first couple of years) Is there any other platform, that shares iNat’s core goals of biodiversity documentation and citizen science, but is not based in or controlled by the United States. Ideally, it should have an active community or meaningful reach within Southern Africa.
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although the post is very old, just based on the numbers of iNat observations noted in the spreadsheet, it looks like she might still be updating the spreadsheet periodically. so you might be able to find some ideas in there.
CORRECTION: based on the last comment in the post (from 4 months ago), it looks like she is no longer maintaining the spreadsheet.
iNat has nothing to do with the current regime and there are plenty of Americans strongly opposed to it. So abandoning this site seems arbitrary to me.
As for your question, many European observers use observation.org, which has a global focus too.
This isn’t a forum for political discussion or grandstanding. I’d ask the moderators to remove or close this thread. Its premise is absurd anyway–that participating in iNat somehow supports US foreign policy. Asking about alternatives to iNat is fine, but opening a political discussion is not imo.
My current understanding of the landscape is that Observation.org and PlantNet might be the best alternatives for you.
The spreadsheet @pisum linked was started over a decade ago and contains the relics of many projects that haven’t stood the test of time. It also contains some problematic links that I haven’t been able to track down, which is why it has a warning on it.
I hope you find a digital home that fits, and wish you all the best. I’m going to close the thread.