I recently attended the annual conference of the American Arachnological Society and there was a lot of discussion about iNaturalist. A lot of folks expressed interest in using iNat, but a short-coming that was highlighted (and a reason many folks still preferred using BugGuide) was the lack of info…

[image] upupa-epops: I vaguely recall staff talking about thinking about adding something like this, but I don’t remember where and I don’t see a request with an “under review” tag. One of the ideas from one of their annual retreat/prioritizing/brainstorming sessions (2019): “Investigate ways…

Completely agree. I will copy and paste a post I made that was not approved because your topic already existed: Integrating species identification features in their pages. I often find myself wondering if a flower is from a species or another; if the different pictures of a bird are just because i…

Many people voiced their opinions in favor of implementing a wiki (identification guides) integrated into iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/posts/113184-inaturalist-receives-grant-to-improve-species-suggestions Honestly, I would love to know if this is still considered. If it is, it would b…

I’m gonna link these together: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-is-this-inaturalist-and-generative-ai/66140/613?u=escol

Also, please see a similar feature request! I think this should be one base feature, it’s just that details are different. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/create-an-identification-center-with-guides-curated-subcategories-events-and-more/48007 Here are few important points of similar nature: […

[image] Create an "identification center" with guides, curated subcategories, events, and more It is very hard to understand how well we’re doing (say, as a local group, or even as iNat as a whole), even though identification is the one thing where you can easily track and show progress. I hav…

See also this older thread asking for something similar: Add Comments or Wiki-Like Functionality on Taxa Pages to Discuss Identification and Other Relevant Issues

Not great that its closed. This seems to be overwhelmingly what people are asking for rather than the blog post with ‘generative AI’, or however their plan is.

You can ask to have the older thread reopened. But 2019? iNat has grown and changed down those years.

It looks like iNat still has a similar goal on which they ended this discussion. Now it’s only the matter on how they want it implemented, from what we see they decided to try out aggregating information from comments and train a (demo) generative model on it, so it can explain a choice of certain s…

Expand the Similar Species tab into an editable identification guide

Feature Requests

DianaStuder June 22, 2025, 8:24pm 53

I have a string of URLs bookmarked for iNat. I include the number of pages waiting in that URL name. Some of us are working thru the backlog from the CNC ‘winner’ 3.5K Disagreements paired with 3% RG

Topic		Replies	Views
Are you fine with the current format of iNat’s species descriptions, or do you wish there was more info like how to identify the species etc? General	86	1731	March 16, 2026
Where do we share how to ID species? Nature Talk	44	1020	July 23, 2025
Create an "identification center" with guides, curated subcategories, events, and more Feature Requests web	54	3213	July 21, 2026
The Future of iNat: What Would You Like To See Improved? General	67	1722	April 1, 2026
Add an interactive system to glean diagnostic features from identifiers and show them to observers Feature Requests	18	2935	August 12, 2020

Expand the Similar Species tab into an editable identification guide

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