Good day, iNaturalist community.
I’m writing to ask for your opinion on the best way to cite iNaturalist observations. I’ve already read the recommended citation guidelines, and my current approach is to cite observations in the text using the observer’s last name, for example, (Smith 2023), where 2023 is the year the observation was uploaded. In the reference list, I cite them as follows:
Smith, J. 2023. iNaturalist observation. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/98489369 . Accessed September 19, 2025.
However, in a manuscript I’m currently preparing, I need to cite at least 15 observations of the same species. Including 15 different observer names in the text seems impractical. To make things even more complicated, many iNaturalist users do not use their real names, but instead have names (not usernames) such as Red Flower, The Scavenger, or Lizard Lover.
I’m therefore unsure how to handle this situation appropriately.
I downloaded the observations using the iNaturalist export tool ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/export ), which generated an Excel spreadsheet. My idea is to clean and edit this dataset, then deposit it in a data repository that assigns a DOI. That way, I could cite the dataset rather than each individual observation. For example, the in-text citation would be (iNaturalist 2026a), and the reference would look something like this:
iNaturalist. 2026a. Grapsus grapsus observations. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1145/2783446.2783605 (accessed September 30, 2025).
Would this be considered an appropriate approach? I would greatly appreciate your thoughts or suggestions.