Great article in the NY Times today about iNaturalist

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Here is a link to a great article about iNaturalist in today’s NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/science/citizen-science-ecology-inaturalist.html

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Here’s a gift link to the article.

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Sorry, I forgot about the paywall! Thank you for providing a better link!

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Hi @wildcatdogs,

Awesome article! Thank you for sharing it! I want to make sure that it gets the great discussion that it deserves.

You probably were not aware (no worries at all!), but the forum has a specific goal of creating a place for constructive discussions, which is outlined in our Community Guidelines.

I think your article is the perfect launchpad for a discussion. To help get the ball rolling, here is one suggestion:

The article notes, “the authors stress, data from iNaturalist . . . has a variety of limitations”.

What do you think are the biggest challenges or biases in the data that we collect?

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“Effort” is not documented so any abundance estimates are problematic.

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thanks for trying to start a discussion here Adam, but I reckon the best focus of the thread would be the incredible contributions that iNat is making to biodiversity research! That’s the core focus of the paper on which the NY Times article is based. For anyone who missed it, here’s the open access research paper (with many iNatters as authors): https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf104

For example, iNat data have now been used in papers across over 128 countries and 638 taxonomic families (at time of writing), an awesome testament to the platform and its users

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I find it somewhat ironic that there is a such a huge emphasis on papers when talking about the impact of iNaturalist. I actually think iNaturalist itself has a huge impact on our collective understanding of the natural world even if there weren’t any papers that cited it. At least in the world of arthropods, there are now countless species that have been “rediscovered” thanks to iNaturalist—species that were previously only known from obscure descriptions and illustrations that now have color photos and location metadata to help us understand them. And a whole genre of scientific papers, species range expansion reports, are now almost moot since you can just look up observation maps in real time using iNaturalist or GBIF now. I look forward to the day when people start listing their iNaturalist stats on their professional CVs instead of just their published papers.

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The biggest biases in the data we collect are probably:

  1. Human density bias.
  2. CV bias due to the Xysticus problem.
  3. Charismatic species bias.

At least we can fix one of those!

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Many people already do put their iNaturalist contributions on their CV’s, when appropriate for the jobs they are seeking. Not “instead of” other accomplishments, of course.

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Rare species can appear common if a lot of people observe them. For example, if a dodo bird (the last one of its kind, hiding out in the Madagascar jungles for 500 years) showed up in New York City, it would quickly be observed by a whole lot of people, suggesting that dodos are common garden birds in NY.

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Your point about iNaturalist allowing the rediscovery of species is a great one! To take just one example, there are many species of sawflies in Japan (and probably other parts of Asia as well, but Japan is what I’m familiar with) that are quite common to encounter, but have very little scientific literature about them, to the point where eleven of these species only had color photos of their larvae published for the first time in 2021 (in this paper: https://www.kahaku.go.jp/research/publication/zoology/download/47_4/L_BNMNS_47-4_163.pdf ). Of those eleven species, five (Aglaostigma albicinctum, Allantus meridionalis, Apethymus kunugi, Siobla ferox and Siobla japonica) now have multiple observations for the larvae on iNaturalist, more than doubling the number of available color photos of the species (which makes them that much easier to ID, which will hopefully lead to even more people posting observations).

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The article (and the original paper in BioScience) are focused on how citizen interest benefits science. But I am equally impressed with how iNaturalist benefits citizens themselves, by awakening their curiosity and excitement about the natural world and helping them value it. A complete win-win.

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This link should work for non-subscribers

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/science/citizen-science-ecology-inaturalist.html?unlocked_article_code=1.aE8.3iLK.9BqNYo7Rs2E3&smid=url-share