Its my expectation that iNaturalist will eventually become the system of record for a lot of the natural history world. It scales well, its affordable, and its practical.
I’m the webmaster for the Ohio Odonata Society, https://www.ohioodonatasociety.org/, and our site has county level records for all the damselfly and dragonfly species observed in the US State of Ohio. We are now collecting all new records using iNat, and every winter, we combine the new records with our existing database, which includes records back to the 19th century.
Before setting up our site, I reviewed a lot of natural history websites across the USA, Canada, and a few in other countries. My impression was that they generally weren’t very good, and my belief is that’s because both the statistical maintenance, and the website sharing, are relatively difficult, and beyond the capabilities of most regional natural history societies. Here in Ohio, the moss community and the birders are the only other ones I’m aware of that have reliable county level species records online. The others are way out of date, or haven’t even started.
What iNat has demonstrated to a significant degree is that most natural history categories can usefully share a non-specialized system. We don’t need eDragonfly, eBeetle, eMammal, etc. And I also don’t see it practical for every regional natural history community to do their own work from scratch. I’d like to see state-level initiatives serving every category. I believe that Maryland and North Carolina both do this.
iNat can’t provide the curation that a regional or state body can, and right now, its unlikely to contain many pre-digital records, but its a lot better than nothing. In many categories, in many locations, iNat provides a very useful record of what has been observed. While that might not be fully satisfying, the pre-digital records were pretty limited too. Just because a small group of people didn’t collect a certain species and put it in a museum during the last century or two doesn’t mean that the species wasn’t there at the time, or before taxonomies and systematic collecting became a practice. My Ohio county shows 662 species of Butterflies & Moths in iNat–I really don’t believe that so many species had been confirmed in the county previous to iNat.