The Drosera rubrifolia story is a nice one, I think. This endemic South African sundew had not been found in the wild since its discovery by the the late Eric Green, despite numerous searches, and had never been photographed in situ. Alex Dietrich discovered a population and published the first photos of this species in situ in iNat in early 2019.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19993148
Some months later Chris Vynbos put up an observation of yet another population without being aware of what he’d found or its significance.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30253195
To me this is a small, but not insignificant, iNat success story.
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It has become the best ever use of my lunch hour.:) Without iNat’s experts, I would have thought it interesting but certainly not of any particular significance.
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This observation of a syrphid I found during last year’s CNC is apparently the first photo set of the species (alive) ever posted online
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iNat played a part in the confirmation of lynx presence in Algonquin Provincial Park a few years ago!
http://www.algonquinpark.on.ca/pdf/raven_2018_2.pdf
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I’ve been using iNaturalist recently to help me in the making of plant comparison/ID guides which I have been publishing online, for example this guide on Norway Maple vs Sugar Maple. Although I am consulting many different sources, including efloras (mainly FNA), numerous print books, and various herbaria and university websites, I’ve found iNaturalist is the single most useful individual source, because it addresses multiple needs and improves the project in multiple ways:
- It has a huge repository of open-licensed photos.
- It has a lot of data on which species tend to be often confused, which is useful for knowing which guides to prioritize making.
- There are a lot of experts on the site and I’ve been able to learn a lot by conversing with them about plant ID. And in turn, these people have connected me to all sorts of other resources I didn’t know about.
I am hoping that in the long-run, these guides can help iNat users who are less experienced with plant ID to learn how to tell apart confusing taxa, which can help to improve the quality of the identifications on the site. I also hope they can make plant ID a little more accessible, as it can be really intimidating to get started with plant ID.
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Hi,
We published a preprint of the paper dealing with rapid progress of the “Flora of Russia” project on iNaturalist. It is available on Russian here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339052553_Flora_of_Russia_on_iNaturalist_big_data_on_biodiversity_of_a_big_country
An English version will be available in due time.
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Great work! Please leave a note when the translation is out.
Just yesterday, I presented your project in a talk for a natural society, where I was demonstrating the scientific values of iNaturalist
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Does this count?
Aw, never mind. I just saw your post. 
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Update: The Russian version of the paper on “Flora of Russia” project is now available as pdf with some maps and graphs: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340024107_Flora_Rossii_na_platforme_iNaturalist_bolsie_dannye_o_bioraznoobrazii_bolsoj_strany . English version will be available in due time
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See page 26 here: https://esc-sec.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Bulletin-Volume52-number1-March2020.pdf
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Cool, @lltimms! I see it starting on numbered page 30 rather than 26. This is a great comparison of participation across three different methods for the Butterfly Blitz. I love that it highlights how participation in iNaturalist can be complementary/synergistic with participating in other ways.
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English version of the paper on the Flora of Russia project was published last week in Biodiversity Data Journal: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345983589_Flora_of_Russia_on_iNaturalist_a_dataset/
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What a nice paper! Not only did I learn more about different regions of Russia, but also it is a great resource when you want to get an overview in what various ways iNaturalist data are used in scientific publications and how to motivate people using the site.
In the course of reading this paper I also looked up some of the recent statistics, and there are two more iNat success stories I find worth mentioning:
South Africa surpassed 1 Million observations (next one would probably be NZ) and Australia has more than 1 Million Research Grade observations!
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