with respect to identifications (and annotations to a degree), I personally think the lack of a bulk tool is a good thing. In my opinion allowing for massive bulk actions increases the chances of making mistakes due to human error. It would also certainly facilitate much easier ‘abuse’ of the system by the very small % of bad actors that might want to game the leaderboards or make troll IDs.
moderation/curation related tasks are a different matter, and I agree some bulk tools would be nice
Well, there is this tool than can help with this (somewhat):
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/announcing-the-universal-metadata-tool-beta/53182
Reliable minions are tough to find these days
There’s a flipside to this. I believe the feedback also works the other way. If the region/taxon seems to be well curated and accurate IDs are applied promptly, it rubs off on regular contributors, and they start to contribute more accurate IDs. The accurately ID’d observations may in turn result in better suggestions from the CV.
This all encourages more contributions from casual observers. That can be a mixed blessing, as it means there’s more ID to work in general, and more “problem” observations that require investigation. I believe you can become the victim of your own success. If you do a good job at curating your taxon/region, you’ll be rewarded with an ever increasing workload.
I like to take a more positive view of this. I think it’s great if more people become interested in taxa for which I have expertise, and upload more records. Makes me happy that they’re getting interested in the groups that I’m interested in myself, I get to live vicariously through those observers and see photos of all kinds of cool organisms that I may only rarely, if ever, see myself in the flesh/live in the field, and it gives me a great chance to continue to improve my own identification skills.
If the price to pay for those things is more work for myself, more IDs to make, more clean up to do, that’s fine by me
I minion for proteas - but no leps ;~))
I suppose a lot depends on what you’ve been tasked with or have committed to doing. If your mandate/commitment is to curate a taxon/region within a specified timeline (for whatever reason - let’s say so the data can be used for publication), it can be disconcerting to find that the better job you do, the more difficult the task becomes.
Side-effects include:
A post was split to a new topic: Is there a way to flag a user?
I think its complicated and very fair to point out the risks bulk tools can have. If implemented they need to have some restrictions to help prevent abuse. Like how in order to edit taxon photos, you need a set amount of RG obs and other stuff.
Still, if iNaturalist achieves its goal to “radically scale up, reaching 100 million users by 2030”, current users that already do a lot of repeatitive tasks could really use more tools to help deal with larger volumes of observations, users, comments, etc.
This is good to mention, though isn’t officially integrated with iNaturalist. This means many people don’t know it exists, may not want to install an external extension, or any other number of reasons that limits its use. Still it is a good tool.
I also largely share this view since it is nice to see people learn more about your taxa of interest.
Yes, I feel this way, too. I offer IDs for many species I will never see in person, and I’m excited when I see some rarer ones get closer to where the CV will be trained on them or where the phenology can be tracked in a meaningful way.
Among the people who engage, perhaps fumbling at first as I did, could be the person I might mentor to carry this forward after me.
Did they say this somewhere? Sounds like a disaster!
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/scaling-identification-expertise
"iNaturalist must radically scale up, reaching 100 million users by 2030. iNat will strategically engage users in the places with the most species remaining to be observed — largely in the global south — by enhancing a global network of conservation partners and the tools iNaturalist offers them. This constituency will rally for and help implement the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s land by 2030.’
This page actually has quite a bit of interesting info. It seems to have a confirmation that staff are going forward with implementing the gen AI comment summarizer as early as December 8th 2025. Note the demo was only released December 3rd 2025 https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/120580-scaling-identification-expertise-exploring-ways-to-learn-from-the-inaturalist-community
“In the coming months, we aim to expand this technology to organize and summarize content not just for 150 species but for over 100,000 species leveraging millions of comments.”
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/inat-supporters
“iNaturalist partners and supporters advance iNaturalist’s efforts to connect 100 million people to nature, cataloging most of the world’s known species to advance biodiversity science and conservation.”
As of writing this 9.63 million iNaturalist accounts have been made. https://www.inaturalist.org/stats If iNaturalists directorship goal is 100 million active users, it is even more of a substantial increase.
Oh wow. Well I guess that makes me answer the title of this thread with “no”! I definitely don’t want the iNat user base to increase 10x over the next 4 years.
Maybe they’re expecting most of these new users to inhabit the “long tail” of minimally active accounts (like the tail that already exists), and so to still be manageable from an infrastructure standpoint. But I agree, the number does sound pretty scary.
I am sure there was a more recent update - iNat will surface useful comments, but will NOT summarise them ?
So, we’re working on a new search system to help people find and sort through useful identification information while ensuring that human expertise and input remain central. We’ll be using insights from our explorations in 2025 to test relevance sorting of comments, but we won’t be summarizing or altering identifier comments. This will initially be rolled out incrementally, starting with a core group of testers on the website.
from https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/123394-our-product-goals-for-january-june-2026
26 Jan 2026
If they hope to draw more iNatters from the Global South - yes - that is a good intention. Both for encouraging more people to engage with nature. And the aim of more knowledge to achieve nature conservation. In fact there is a lot of the world where ‘iNat needs to shine a light’ https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/low-growth-countries-and-territories
from Diana way down South in Darkest Africa look at that project banner !
PS in an ideal world. Less junk from CNC in 2026 ? Pushback against garbage student projects (flush and forget). All iNatters gently pushed to pull their weight with IDs or annotations. Win win.
Yes there was a more recent update, but that system in my eyes can be considered seperate from what the actual gen ai demo is. There is a difference between having the CV give identification comments and tips summarized from comments, and a new search system to find comments.
They can exist separately and serve similar but different goals.
I work very regionally, so as long as the growth is happening elsewhere, it will probably have minimal impact on me. But if the local user base grows significantly, I’ll probably head for the exits.
I wanted to add a bit more context to the 100 million goal. This is an aspirational number that reflects the full scope of how people might connect with nature through iNaturalist: observers making observations, identifiers helping with IDs, Seek users learning about species around them, researchers accessing data, educators bringing iNaturalist into classrooms, conservation partners using the platform for their work, people accessing the website as a reference, and more. The core mission to connect people to nature and advance science and conservation remains unchanged — this big-picture goal is about expanding the network of people connecting with nature in diverse ways to move forward that shared mission.
Re. the ID summaries demo: the December test was part of exploring how to help people find and reference the wealth of identification expertise that already exists on iNat. Based on what we learned from that exploration, the focus has shifted slightly. The first half of 2026 will bring work on a new search system to help people find and sort through useful identification information in existing ID remarks — without summarizing or altering what identifiers have shared. This approach keeps human expertise and input central while making it easier for everyone to learn from the incredible knowledge already contributed by the community. Separately, we know that one of the challenges IDers face is that too many observations have poor-quality evidence — with this in mind, we’ll be testing out photo tips later in the year to ideally help observers take more identifiable photos while drawing on data from observation comments and ID remarks.
The product goals post has the most current information on this work, and updates will continue as things progress!
EDITED 2/10: Updated language referencing iNaturalist’s core mission to be more accurate
Looking forward to seeing this implanted, this would be so useful for both observers and identifiers alike!
Thank you for the clarification, it’s greatly appreciated.
It sounds like users in “reaching 100 million users by 2030” is using users in a more broad sense as in anybody that uses iNaturalist, not just users of the site with accounts. This does make it easier to reach and is not the same as wanting to expand observers / active account holders to 100 million.