I believe it is the main reason iNat was developed, to have a platform to encourage everyone to engage with nature, that is its success. That everyone is met exactly where they are and encouraged to grow.
Edit: I forgot to answer the question… yes I attended the webinar live via YouTube… kinda. I wandered out the door because I can listen through my hearing aids easiest… and kept pausing to photograph… so I didn’t miss anything, it just took longer! 
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Being an iNat user from the beginning, it’s difficult for me to have any real perspective on what aspects of iNat led to its current success level, but one thing I know for sure is that iNat has been very lucky to have many dedicated people around the world volunteer their time, energy, and expertise to not only help with IDs, curate taxonomy and moderate behavior, but also promote iNaturalist. iNat’s growth has basically been organic, we don’t advertise or really promote it outside of regular social media posts, talks, and now some webinars. People have found it, liked it, and wanted to share it.
It’s incredibly humbling that people have given so much to iNat, and a lot of its success is due to them.
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This suggests that the relevant comparison is between iNaturalist and other all-taxa platforms. Two that come to mind are Jungle Dragon and QuestaGame. I know that QuestaGame is not liked around here, but I have looked at their website, and they have a different focus than iNaturalist, more conservation-focused. This shows in some of their different rules, such as no pictures of birds on nests, and that pictures of a wild animal being held in a human hand are usually rejected.
So the question is, has anyone compared the popularity of iNaturalist with that of Jungle Dragon and QuestaGame?
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I only started seriously using iNat in 2022, so I don’t have a good historical overview of what other platforms existed and how they fared. I’ve never really used eBird aside from looking at the site a few times and using the Merlin app, and I’ve used BugGuide all of twice, I think.
So with those caveats - I think one of the exciting features of iNat is being able to look at a specific place and see what has been seen there, all the way down to a specific neighbourhood or park. Some people really enjoy the top-down “what sorts of things exist” way of learning, and iNat really caters to that. You can just pop open a map and have a sense (somewhat misleading at times, of course) of what and how many specific organisms have been seen in a place. Other sites I’ve explored either don’t seem to have a map feature, or they have one but it doesn’t really communicate where specific things were sighted in a very immediate way, and require you to mentally adjust to their data models a bit more.
I think there’s also something to be said for the fairly clean UI and a lack of ads and excessive social media integration. Compared to the rest of the internet, iNaturalist feels like a pretty calm platform, one that isn’t trying to drown you in ads or in the latest design hooks to maximize user retention and conversion; but it still feels fairly modern and reasonably organized. It’s a relatively pleasant platform to use on a sensory level, compared to the wider internet ecosystem.
I get the sense that bioblitzes as a concept have also helped boost iNaturalist’s success, and the mapping, the focus on individual encounters, the all-encompassing taxonomy, and the leaderboards do seem to make it more suited to hosting bioblitzes than most. People seem to be becoming increasingly interested in/concerned about biodiversity, and iNaturalist provides a platform for people who are organizing activities to help people feel involved and connected with nature and its protection, so it’s a nice synergy between event organizers and iNatters (though not without some friction!).
The social aspects of iNaturalist are also a big deal, I think; the community ID system really supports developing a sense of pleasant familiarity with strangers, and from there, making connections and friends on the platform leads to a sense of community. Simple things like seeing a profile pic alongside a name, instead of a bare username, are probably more powerful than they might initially appear. I think the social design encourages people to recruit their friends and family to the platform, more than they might if the platform made it harder to recognize and connect with the other individuals who use it.
The AI has been mentioned, and I’d echo that. AI help is why I use Merlin as my only non-iNat naturalizing tool - iNat doesn’t have Computer Hearing yet! I really wish it did; Merlin seems unlikely to start IDing insect or mammal sounds, after all.
I’d also echo with the comments about the one-stop-shop appeal, and the note that an app presence on Android and iPhone simultaneously is probably also relevant, compared to apps that are limited to one or the other, or website-only platforms.
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I think the best thing that iNat did is to be a one-stop shop. I’m interested in all aspects of the natural world. I don’t want to learn a new app or website just because I’ve recorded a butterfly rather than a moth. I might record a bird tomorrow. I might record a whale the day after that. If I had to figure out a new workflow I wouldn’t bother to post those observations. However, I know that iNat will take them and I know how to use it.
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Two aspects that I haven’t seen mentioned –
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English, with many other languages supported. There are two South Korean citizen science sites that operate similar to iNaturalist but both are completely in Korean, which makes it unlikely they’ll ever receive much attention internationally. With English spoken by so many people around the world as a primary or secondary language, this almost automatically gives sites a boost when it comes to becoming popular.
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Based in the United States. This is somewhat related to the above point, but the USA has a fairly large population and land area with a number of different communities and subcultures. For example, people who like nature photography, or are interested in conservation efforts, or with yards wondering what lives on their land, or involved in science who are interacting with data, etc. Along similar lines, the intersection of people with free time to pursue citizen science, the equipment to take photos (the default assumption of what is required for an observation), access to what an individual considers ‘nature’ and an interest in visiting such locations (using iNaturalist and similar sites can influence how someone defines ‘nature’ and related terms …) This isn’t meant to imply that people in the United States ‘care more’ about nature, just that there’s a larger base from which to draw that initial support from.
It’s gotten much better, but I remember when I first started using the Forum (and Google Group) there were comments that were worded in such a way that it gave the impression that there was an underlying assumption that everyone shared the background of being a native English speaker located in either the USA or Canada. The community here has grown more diverse, but being an English site in the USA / North America likely played a helpful role in the beginning.
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Couldn’t agree more, Tony. iNat certainly is a massively useful repository of information and imagery. But I keep coming back because I enjoy the community. As “The Friendliest Place on the Internet”, as I think the NY Times characterized it, it is just fun, gratifying and, for lack of a better word, comfortable to spend time on iNaturalist. It’s about learning and sharing with a huge community of generally like-minded people around the world–at least as far as their interest in the natural world is concerned.
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In my experience this has been helped along, in turn, by iNat’s amazingly well-designed and feature-rich software, and the active dedication to maintaining and improving it.
We may all have our grumbles, pet peeves, and desired changes and Feature Requests, but big-picture, the interface and tools available on the platform (and the resulting rich and growing data) make it easier to stay and harder to leave.
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Didn’t catch the webinar. My mom needed me to help her out.
I came to iNat through experience with much more narrowly focused web-based observation projects with Indigenous communities. Trailmark was the one I became most familiar with. During the process of identifying and evaluating options for that work, iNat came up as an exanple and a possibility so I spent a bit of time looking at it and thought it looked cool but not really like the best fit for what we were doing.
It stuck in my memory as something to check out when I had more time. “More time” turned out to be recovering from a really nasty bout of COVID in the 2020 first wave: puttering about our property was as much hiking as I could manage. I decided to make learning to identify bumblebees using iNat a project. I was hooked pretty much immediately, in spite of not getting a lot of interest in the blurry bee photos i took with my Blackberry. The user friendly comnunity, the commitment to learning and the Forum all made it easy.
I also spent a lot of time in Explore mode, looking at places where I had been, places I thought about visiting and places about which I was just curious. I still do that sometimes. For some of us iNat isn’t just an identification tool or a community research project, it’s entertainment. Every so often I click on Botswana, where I lived in the 80s, just to see what’s being seen. In the process I learn stuff. Occasionally there may be something I know how to identify.
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I imagine the fact that iNat was adopted by the organizers of the City Nature Challenge has contributed substantially to the visibility of iNat vis-a-vis other platforms.
I’m in a part of Europe where there are a couple of other popular platforms with a similar purpose (observation.org, naturgucker.de). Before I joined iNat in 2022, I did some research about what options were available and I found several articles that recommended observation.org over iNat because it relies on experts instead of crowd-sourcing for validation, is EU-based (compliance with data protection requirements etc.), and at the time was more widely used in Germany than iNat. But ultimately I ended up choosing iNat because the user interface of the website was so much better than the other observation portals.
I am mostly a website user, though I do have the android app and use it for uploading occasional phone photos. The computer vision help in identification was not a major consideration in my decision about which platform to choose.
If I lived, say, 20 km or so further east, I would likely have signed up for Insekten Sachsen, which is connected with some of the state and non-profit nature protection organizations, has a strong local community, and seems to be better integrated into official reporting schemes, but I am on the wrong side of the state border.
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For the webinar - I skipped most of the audio, and went thru the linked slides at my own pace. Those are dense with fascinating info! Thanks tiwane for meeting us where we are.
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For me, the secret sauce is the ease of uploading and how neat the UI is. I still cant figure out how to use e-bird properly, and ive been using it for more years than iNaturalist!
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To me it’s first and foremost ID from others, but a lot of why I came to iNat is the ease of access to the data. Since I found iNat, I still can’t wrap my head around how eBird, with all its popularity and endless amounts of data that it gets can be soooo incredibly bad for anyone who wants to get any data from it. You still can’t search for arbitrary group in an arbitrary area!
I think a lot of boils down to iNat being designed with the user in mind, not with the “we are so scientific nothing else matters” mindset. That’s how you retain a large userbase - if you actually do a product for them, not for you.
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All the misidentifications on eBird (5 Eurasian Blackbirds in the same place in Maine, Anhinga = Double-crested Cormorant, etc.) annoyed me. Then I found iNat, and all was well! Until the next weird rare bird alert…
Anyway, iNaturalist posts can be ID-ed by other people instead of just the observer.
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It is fairly easy to discuss the identification of tricky to ID things and to ask questions etc.
It is quite obvious how stuff works - just register and get started.
CV is becoming better and better.
More and more experts join and contribute.
iNat has become the main reference for many regions and taxa when people try to Id something by photo comparison.
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Very well thought out portal project, possibility of authentic interaction with users. Great idea and implementation.
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I think maybe because iNat was started before the others? Mostly they are copycats, I was told, and draw on INaturalist to function. Then there’s the breadth of what can be done with INaturalist data, from community identifiers to research.
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Thanks! But just to be clear, I didn’t have anything to do with the presentation, aside from providing minor feedback on the slides and answering text questions on Zoom when it was live. The presentation was all Michelle, Carrie, and Scott, they deserve the credit.
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For someone who’s “only” been on iNaturalist since 2022, you seem to have grasped the essence really well!
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I agree with lots of what people have written here - the community (and community ID), the broad taxonomic focus, the connection to GBIF, ease of use and responsiveness of the team to requests for changes, the versatility of Explore with taxonomic and geographic filtering easily customisable, the projects, multiple languages and names…
A huge strength of iNaturalist is the hierarchical taxonomic backbone, which means you can search observations by family, genus, or whatever, and find all the species, subspecies or other levels nested within those. eBird doesn’t have that. If I want to do something simple like see what ducks have been seen in an area, on eBird I need to go into the predefined geographic areas, which might be too big to be relevant, or into a nearby hotspot, which might be too small, or use an external tool to summarise lists within a polgon, and even then I’ll just get a list of all species of birds observed in that area where I need to scroll down to the ducks. iNaturalist is so much more user-friendly for querying data both taxonomically and geographically.
There’s also the feeling that, given its size, community and investment, iNaturalist has a good chance of persisting in the long term, unlike some other sites that have flourished for a few years and then died away. That gives me confidence to archive my observations on iNat.
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