I was introduced to iNaturalist when it popped up as the 3rd search result when I searched for a certain plant taxon, of which I do not remember the name.
How were you introduced to iNaturalist? was it a friend? was it a youtube video? was it a Facebook group saying it was an ID app?
City Nature Challenge, encouraged by a friend to participate
I’m a City Nature Challenge success story. 
It was the right thing at the right time for me (during the pandemic). The ability to work from home allowed me to hike in the morning before work, and I became curious about all of the plants I was seeing on our trails.
I joined for a school project (not CNC affiliated, just a nearby bioblitz). I was the only member of the class to even participate, let alone continue using iNat, but I’m glad I did!
I joined after a few years of using Seek and being frustrated by the (at times) inaccurate IDs. I started out very sparsely using iNat, and I still primarily use the mobile app version on my phone, but today I use it a heck of a lot more than I did when I started about a year ago. I wish I’d gotten it sooner.
Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t’s instagram
I took an ecology field class in community college and my Professor had us sign up to document our observations
Tomorrow is my 3 year anniversary on Inat!! I joined during Covid after being interested in birdwatching for a few weeks. I downloaded Inat and cannot stop the “addiction” since!
I was asked by Kelly O’Donell if I would lead a student group looking for mollusks in the Macauley Honors College annual sophomore Bioblitz, in 2014. That bioblitz was at the botanical garden in the Bronx. We all had to join iNat. I joined, but it was all brand new to me at that point, so I did not do much at first, but instead asked a few of the students to help me actually make the observations.
If I recall correctly, I had made a post about an insect I found on another site asking for an ID there and someone in the comments introduced me to iNat and suggested I share it here. Ironically, I’ve been talking about the site with a friend for quite some time now and he’s considering joining now as well. How the tables have turned!
The Twitter algorithm in 2018 somehow figured I’d be interested in nerdy things (I am) and there was a tweet recommended to me that was a thread of different apps that involved a variety of, well, kinda geeky stuff. iNaturalist was the only one that stuck, though. One other app was for organizing your D&D stuff and another was for tracking your comic book collection (I do this on paper). It was that type of stuff. Another app that was suggested was one I already used, Radiooooo (that’s 5 O’s). I’ll stand by the nature of the tweet and it being directed at me. Twitter def knew what it was doing.
i found it online and immediately started making obs of anything i could find inside at the time it was dark out and i was so excited!
Back pretty close to when iNat was first released I was in grad school experimenting with a variety of citizen science projects and applications, testing them out to see which ones had the best suite of features and ease of use.
I hadn’t been happy with most of them for a variety of reasons (poor implementation, overly limited in terms of taxa, restricted to certain geographic areas, etc, etc) and of all of the ones I tested out iNat was the one that seemed to be the best.
Finally officially joined in 2011 (had been looking at it for a while before that year), and been using it since.
The BIMBY Project!
Took a course on citizen science in college and we had a day where where instead of lecture it was a BioBlitz. Joined a couple BioBlitz’s after that cause it was so much fun. Still here after like 4 years.
My introduction to iNaturalist was a youtube video on the channel AVNJ. The creator is active on here, and I follow him as a thank you.
i gave in and decided to look up “leaf photo identifier” in the app store, and inat popped up. then i was reeled in by the community and everything else way beyond the ai ID system
I had a lot of wildlife pics from a trip to china. Initially I tried to ID them, but I didn’t have reference books for things like plants and insects so I reached out to a science communicator who I watched on youtube, Emily Graslie (formerly of the Brain Scoop), if she knew of any resources for IDing wildlife photos and she recommended iNat and one or two others.
Cascade Pika Watch! They trained us on how to use iNaturalist as part of the tools used to record sightings of low-elevation American pikas in the Columbia River Gorge, so they could study them to figure out how they can tolerate higher average temperatures than more alpine populations.
crime pay but botany doesnt youtube and podcast