Cool topic! I love the natural world. It all started in 2012 with ebird as I became part of Audubon and they encouraged people to sign up. Eventually I did. By 2018 I know I wanted to branch out so I internet searched for other databases outside of birds. Discovered Odonata Central for dragon & damsel flies. But still I wanted it broader and by chance found iNaturalist in 2018. LOVE IT! The best thing is the willingness to share with others hence allowing outsiders tag and add to there records. A few of mine have been used like a butterfly observation, dragonflies pulled to OC… it feels good to know my observation are worthy enough to use. Now I mostly use iNat just by theses of including pics. Not to mention, any life form can get posted. Truly amazing.
I volunteer during park cleanups in my city. The parks department sent out emails about the BioBlitz one year and it sounded like fun, so I went. I put my observations in iNaturalist for that and got hooked.
I “discovered” iNat twice. The first time was in 2014 when I submitted a few pictures but found it kind of amateurish and lame. A couple of years later I was in charge of a coastal restoration monitoring project. I ran the surveys but really didn’t know the vegetation, so I needed help with IDs and tried again. By then iNaturalist had grown immensely and was a great platform for us. Some 15k observations later, I use it more ways than I can count, and have met many valuable colleagues. It’s a whole universe.
The portal was recommended to me by a friend of mine, a botanist from Florida.
A friend of mine brought it up to me in a conversation and I was transfixed since wandering looking for critters was something I did already. I downloaded it and started looking around my campus right away for things to observe. That was almost 3 years ago, now. I am starting to find my niche with Mustela identification and enjoying iNat with friends!
I used to work a very challenging job that had dulled my love for anything, really, but especially for the biotic world. Still, on my walk to the train station I’d take note of the plants and critters I’d run into, including snails. I wanted to know the species of snail and if there were invasive snails. I tried to google “snails id NJ” and other iterations which wasn’t fruitful. Somewhere on the open internet was there suggestion to use iNaturalist to help identify the snail.
Here’s my first observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/25646481
Obviously, I kept using the app even though I had my question answered.
It’s funny to me because I’m not super into snails and you’d think I would have heard about iNaturalist somewhere, but that job and my life had kept me from friendships and relationships based on the same shared interest/love. A side effect of iNat and my reconnect to nature has been great friendships and reconnecting with people from my past. Thank you so much, iNaturalist!
I was researching few species I really wanted to find, more specifically I was researching range maps, one of the first results that came up was iNat, I was curious so I clicked and made an account the same day.
Sometime around 2012-13, I was in a meeting with fellow biologists and someone there talked about this website for uploading images and data for observations of plants and animals and its potential value in documenting the fauna and flora in my state. I wasn’t really intrigued, thinking it was some sort of Facebook-style site. Around the same time I was queried by iNat staff for a couple of photos I have on Flickr and if I’d “donate” them to the species pages on iNat, which I did. I still wasn’t really involved in iNat; my first submissions, not that many, were in 2013 when there were fewer than 500,000 records total. But I gradually came to see the value of the site and its rapidly growing database and iNat has become a useful reference for me when researching some organism I know little about.
My biology teacher showed me the app for a work but actually I use iNaturalist almost everyday.
I got to know and started using it in the online community where biology lovers gather.
I am delighted to connect my records to this wonderful database :)
I suggest an identification of Short-eared Owl. Anyone care to ID the other taxa?
Umm, a turtle and a conifer? Oh and human of course. Can’t really go further than that.
Turtle looks like one from Deirochelyinae?
from my science teacher during quarantine (online school). we had to identify a certain amount of plants and go to our local parks in search of critters.
In the local newspaper. There was an article about the unusual amount of butterflies. And there they mentioned this app as a way to help scientists.
Welcome, nice to have you with us!
Welcome to the community 
This website was recommended by my best friend and also my nature mentor