iNaturalist Updates for January 2025

News and Updates
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Here’s a list of iNat updates for January 2025.

General

  • Two new Computer Vision models were released, 2.18 and 2.19!
  • iNat conducted a webinar about plant phenology and how to annotate plant observations on iNaturalist!
  • The iNat team continues to gather feedback for the iNaturalist Next app, which has been soft-launched for iPhones.
  • Continued work on API v2 - curators can test it and provide feedback, see this topic
  • Many additional translations throughout the websites and apps - you can help

Website

  • Added functionality to search for observations by time of day.
  • Various small bug fixes and changes.

Android

View all release notes

  • Several bugfix releases, the latest of which is 1.36.5 (625)
  • The Android app’s replacement continues to be in pre-Alpha testing

Legacy iOS & iPadOS

  • No new version release
  • Fixed a minor server-side bug that affected photo editing in observations.

Seek

  • No monthly challenges will be released for the foreseeable future.
  • Internal testing with an updated onboard model

iNaturalist Next (currently iPhone only)

  • Version 0.54.1 released, with multiple bug fixes and updates
  • Please provide feedback if you’re using it! There’s an option in the app’s side menu to do so.

iNat Blog

For even more bug fixes and updates, check out iNaturalist on github and see previous monthly updates.

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Anything going on with that experiment in which identifiers are shown the observations of new users?

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Yes please. I have taken that as a prompt to keep up with Newbies for the Western Cape and Africa. It is the (very) small window to catch people - please split, please delete, where, when, bird or beetle, come back …

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I really wish the Android app received more attention. Since Android is the dominant mobile system in Brazil, it’s frustrating to recommend iNaturalist to people without a computer—where the experience is clearly best—knowing they will have to rely on a slow app with a poor layout. Many users might give up on the platform because of this.

Is there a specific challenge in developing the app for Android, or is it more a matter of limited resources, prioritization, or a lack of trained professionals?

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There are limited resources for development yes but but mostly the first reason:

That said, I have not experienced the current Android app being slow? You may want to open a new topic to help troubleshoot the issue you are running into.

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Hopefully new challenges for SEEK will occur, when this testing is over…

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Hopefully, yes. It would be cool if challenges could be offered for taxa that iNaturalist needs more identifications for. Aside from those challenges, it would be cool to see challenges for super local species (each user gets different target taxa based on who is around and which gaps exist in what we have individually observed or not). Also, challenges designed to test the new biodiversity available for ID through the new vision model could be helpful, internally for the app.

More Seek Levels would also be kind of cool. I am up toward 1250, and feel I’ve only seen less than half of the species observed on iNaturalist within 5 miles of me.

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Yes, even more levels would be so great!! - Even a friend of mine, who I brought to SEEK, he only observes what he finds in his garden was a bit sad as he recognised he already had reached the final level.
And he is more a gardener than an observer …

And also these people are important. He told me about species I never heard of. . And that they harm his plants/or not/are good for them etc.

I think, the developers can’t do everything at once, but it would be so great to get more levels and new challenges from time to time…

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