I think one reason also is the quality of the inat CV - for wildflowers it beats all the really expensive plant id apps I had tried, sometimes by a lot (for wildflowers, for distinguishing the 1000 garden cultivars of the same species inat is useless obviously). So anyone comparing plant id apps can’t really skip over inat even though inat is much more than that.
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I joined may 8th 2020 and uploaded my first observation immediately. By July 1 of that year I had over 4000 observations. I now have 39K and counting.
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I never realized iNat was as old as it was. Given how popular it is now it is amazing it took so long to catch on. I joined in 2016 and I can’t recall how I found out about the app. I think I used it to upload random things I wanted to know the names of during hikes. I was VERY sparing with the uploads for like a year afterward until I got into taking photos of noteworthy moths on my light sheets and found iNat to be a useful place to keep the images. It didn’t take long to figure out the power of the site as a repository for specimen data without having to collect the moths. Now I can’t imagine my naturalist life without this site
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I’ve seen a lot of people on social media bring it up as a tool to ID things, often in response to ID questions on like Facebook or Twitter.
I feel like doing that gives people an impression that it’s just a tool to do that and not anything more
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I’ve been on iNat since 2016 right around the time of the very first CNC (go Team LA btw)
It’s amazing seeing how much it’s grown so far, and it’s definitely been a huge part of my life in the past 7 years (!!!)
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I think it also comes up with other plant ID apps in the Apple Store when you search for apps (though I only did this once). No idea about Android.
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I joined about 4 years ago after hearing about it on a sustainability podcast where they were talking to a gastropod expert who mentioned it. I think it was just before a City Nature Challenge. I was pretty into it right away. Using iNaturalist got me into birding, which I wasn’t all that interested in before. Being able to post and identify what I was seeing and the excitement of seeing something new added a whole new level to it.
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Yes, I think that’s why we get so many first timers posting house plants. Ironically, those are the observations that rarely get ID’d.
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I wonder why this US-State has been named “Mississippi”, as the name-giving river is only on one shore part of the state. The state on both riversides is called “Lousiana”.
Louisiana was named for Louis XIV of France around 100 years before the US created the Mississippi Territory (which was bordered by the Miss. River). Louisiana didn’t become part of the US until after that.
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I’m not really sure what this has to do with the rest of the thread but I appreciate the non-sequitur anyway
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Well the OP asked “how long?” and a Mississippi is informally used as a unit of time equal to about a second (e.g., one Mississippi, two Mississippi ….)
;-)
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I became interested in plant identification when I moved to the countryside and decided to build a wildlife pond.
Aquatic plants are the backbone of a pond and I wanted to learn what was native to my area and what they looked like.
During my research I stumbled upon this Youtube video that highly recommends iNat as a didactic tool.
Originally I only used it passively to see what the plants I was interested in looked like, but eventually I started posting my own photos, specifically after encountering and photographing this insect near a stream by my house.
I became a habitual user ever since.
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My first obs was feb 2017, then I waited more than a year for my next one. Late 2018 I started really getting into it. I was aware of its existance before that, but never really knew what it was about. Before that I was posting most of my obs to insta, and looking for IDs via various means. Working for the Department of Conservation NZ, I was aware on some of our web pages the note “We don’t offer IDs, but Inaturalist is a good source” (or some variations). I had always enjoyed doing IDs at work, and still do. But I am in a front facing position where I have time for casual IDs. Not so easy for most others.
Once I fell down the rabbit hole, its one of my most used sites, and at work I recomend it to several visitors most days.
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I’m pretty sure I started posting on iNat as soon as I found out it existed. I remember thinking, “Wait, you mean someone actually wants my dorky nature shots? They won’t get bored and kick me off? I’m in.”
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I came to iNat with the intent to create a project, for which I needed to create a place, for which I found out I needed to have a minimum number of verifiable observations. Next, I discovered the “import from Flickr” function and a few days later I had 200+ imported obs and was able to create my projects. And then I kept importing… and importing… I had used my Flickr account to post a lot of nature photography so it was a perfect match for iNat and already had location info and species annotations on many of my pictures there. So importing was a breeze and I could do that during my lunch break at work without the need to go out to make observations.
By the time I went out to make my first observation specifically for iNat (about a month after joining), I had imported close to 2,000 observations from my Flickr photos. What triggered the new observation was a question on one of my old ones about additional details to verify ID, for which I had no pictures. However, I knew exactly where the plant was located and took it as an excuse for a hike to get another observation of it now that I knew what was important for ID.
My first “iNat photo safari” if you will that I undertook with the specific goal of making observations I think happened about three months after joining. By that time I had over 2,700 observations mostly imported from Flickr and some more uploaded from my computer. I probably still have thousands of pictures worth uploading from my years before joining iNat. About 42% of my observations are those old ones based on pictures I took before joining, but I’m now up to more than half being new since I joined.
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Found a dead butterfly in the lab and tried to figure out what it was…came across the inat website, ignored it and moved on. Some time later started noticing more critters during short hikes and began photographing some with my phone. Decided to check out the website once more and well… here I am.
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I’ve been involved since 2011. I heard about it a year or two earlier, and had been trying out other citizen science apps during that time, like Project Noah, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them.
I decided to give iNat a try and found I preferred it over any of the competitors, so I stuck with it.
Through happenstance, I wound up meeting Ken-Ichi a few years later, becoming friends, and having a minor part in co-writing the Citizen Science Manifesto, cementing my preference for iNat even more.
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My FB use is skewed towards fynbos groups. So I see familiar ‘faces’ in both places.
And from FB we invite new people to come to iNat (for wildflowers not commonorgarden, so much easier to ID here, with Seen Nearby, possible species, a set of photos, can tweak to fruit etc.) People may not want to invest time in iNat - name my flower may be all they want. That first learning curve at iNat is daunting - it took me perhaps a year to see my newbie mistakes, now I can pay it forward.
Another issue is impatience. ‘I put it on iNat yesterday, and haven’t got an ID yet!!’
Active iNatters have both the time available and the level of interest.
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Twenty-two twenty-three for us outside USA 
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