iNaturalist Updates for March 2025

Here’s a list of iNat updates for March 2025.

General

  • 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

Various small bug fixes and changes, such as:

Android

View all release notes

  • No new release.

Legacy iOS & iPadOS

Seek

Version 2.17.0 released with some big updates:

  • On-device Computer Vision model updated to version 2.13, which contains about 80k taxa - four times the number of taxa that was previously available!
  • If Seek is allowed to access your location, it will use the Geomodel to provide better identification suggestions
  • For Apple users, Seek now uses the system-level photo picker, which is more searchable and fixes a bug that blanked out the screen if the photo library was too large

iNaturalist Next (currently iPhone only)

Released version 0.59.12 that includes a bunch of changes, notably:

  • new “standard” mode with simpler interface and “match” screen after taking or importing a single photo. You can always go to Settings and turn on Advanced Settings for more options.
  • In standard mode, long press the AI camera button to access all observation creation options (eg sound recording, bulk photo import)
  • Many smaller interface updates and bug fixes.

iNat Blog

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

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Hi! Can the new iNaturalist Next app be used for participating in the City Nature Challenge? There was an article saying that it has no functionality for projects

Sorry about that, the help page is outdated and I’ve updated it to specify that the app doesn’t include functionality to add observations to traditional projects. City Nature Challenge projects are collection projects and don’t require that functionality. Just make observations during the CNC dates and in CNC areas and they’ll be added to the proper project.

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