Hi everyone!
I am a uni student majoring in ecology and marine biology, and hence have great interest in wildlife and the natural world. I enjoy using iNaturalist a lot, but feel like the engagement I have with the platform stems from my further interest to pursue a career in the field of ecology. I have a few friends that frequently send me photos of birds and other wildlife they encounter asking for IDs, and I often use the iNat computer vision suggestions to assist, however don’t post the observation myself as to my knowledge I shouldn’t since I’m not the original observer. One friend recently asked me if they should get an iNat account, and although I encouraged them to contribute, they were unsure if it would be of benefit to them, since they aren’t studying biology and only have a casual interest.
Ultimately I’m curious as to how people without a background in biology interact with the platform, and what their motivations are to do so. What are the benefits of the platform to these people? Any tips or anectodes I could use to encourage this friend?
Hello!
I’m just a high school student who loves fish. I started using iNat as a way to hone my fish identification skills, which then branched into learning sharks and a little bit about my native birds. Today I still use iNat to ID fish, but I’ve also found it incredibly helpful as a way to connect with all the other cool critters and plants in nature around me. Of my ~1,900 observations, only 270 are fish. I would heavily encourage your friend to begin using iNat. Assuming they would be primarily interested in just using it to observe nature (for now ), you can teach them to sort by different taxon/areas in the explore tab to show them species in their area, use it as a lifelist to document and learn about the different species you come across, as well as learn a thing or two along the way. As for tips, I would tell your friend to not be afraid to ask for help/elaboration, (especially when someone disagrees with your ID). Not only will this teach them how to better ID the species they are observing, but it will also help them better utilize iNat as a tool to do so. Hope that helps :)
Not a biologist either, just a nature enthusiast.*
The thing that’s wonderful about iNat is that people can engage with it at multiple levels. You don’t have to be a biologist for the site to have value. There are people who use it as a way to learn about the biodiversity around them. People use it to track invasive species, or changing distributions. People use it as an expanded birding life list. (One of the reasons that I like iNat a whole lot better than eBird is the visual aspect: a mere list of species names is kind of boring.)
I love dragonflies and damselflies. I discovered iNat through OdonataCentral a couple of years ago, and started posting observations. That was the better part of 3000 observations and 600 species—most of which are not Odonata—ago, and I’m still discovering new things. More than that, I’m working on the parameters for a project to 1) determine the ranges of and 2) differentiate a couple of problematicly similar species of damsel.
As far as your friends go, I’d say that casual interest is still interest, and interest and curiosity are what make iNat work. Other than that, I can’t put it much better than @onefishyboi did.
*(Full disclosure: my partner is a biostatician who works with genomic data. Apparently, I’m more willing to talk shop with him than is usual in relationships where both persons are not in the same field. This means that while I’m not a biologist, I could fake it in department gatherings well enough to be asked which part of the project I was responsible for.)
Well, the whole point of citizen science is that people who aren’t scientists can participate. Lots of us have little or no formal scientific training and work in jobs that have nothing to do with biology.
I think the main motiviation for using iNat is an interest in and curiosity about nature.
I joined iNat because I enjoyed watching the bees nesting on my balcony and I wanted to keep a record of the insects that visited my plants. Lots of people use iNat to document what they have seen, or to record biodiversity in their home gardens, and to get help identifying what they have seen.
Another reason for using iNat is that the data is available for use by scientists. Just because the data is collected by laypersons in everyday situations and may not seem unusual or exciting doesn’t mean that the data is useless for scientific purposes.
And probably the most important reason people use iNat: because we find it fun!
Not everyone will find that iNat meets a need for them – I have some friends who are interested in nature (and sometimes send me photos for identification), but have not chosen to create an iNat account. I figure it is like any other hobby or social network: some people will decide they want to sign up and get involved more intensively, whereas others may be perfectly happy to continue to engage with nature in a less formal way.
It’s interesting you see it that way, because I tend to view it almost in the reverse. From my perspective, iNat is principally for enthusiasts, nature lovers, wildlife tourists, birdwatchers, hikers, gardeners, and a thousand other kinds of ‘amateurs’ – whereas serious professional biologists may find it a little too casual for their purposes.
(Of course, I wouldn’t deny that iNat can serve many useful functions for the professional too, but they do need to be careful to take into account the ad hoc citizen-science nature of the data; it seems to me that the significant majority of people active here do not belong to the professional category.)
Your friends are clearly curious enough about nature to want an ID on species they see (hence why they reach out to you), so I would argue that they are exactly the kind of people iNat is for. There’s no minimum or maximum level of appropriate engagement with the site. Perhaps some of those friends would only upload 3 or 4 observations a year when they desire an ID on something, while others might get motivated to use it as much as you do, or more. Either is fine.
I found this because I was looking for a way to identify plants in my yard. I’ve slowly been planting more natives, and wanted to see if I had any foreign or invasive species that I should replace. I also liked that I could use the forum to ask for more advice.
I’ve always had ties to the natural world, as a child, digging in the dirt, catching creatures and letting them go…but adulthood got in the way.
I did make sure my daughters got to splash in puddles and swamp stomp for fun. (One works for a park system, so something clicked)
Unforeseen disability crept in and almost wiped me out.
I joined iNat somewhere along my healing journey. As I walked (couldn’t handle a quarter mile without huffing and resting) my curiosity was stoked…what is that? …who is that? And although I had spent a few years photographing before disability, I didn’t delve into identification. I found Seek, then iNat.
Now, I easily walk a couple miles a day, and have thousands of observations.
iNat wasn’t intended for the “experts”, or even the “highly educated”. It’s for people like me, and your friends, the regular everyday folks who have a curiosity.
Two things to keep as you grow: Curiosity and Play.
iNat seems to aid in both.
I’m a video game designer, so there’s not much professional benefit to me using iNaturalist.
That being said, I’ve made friends through iNat, and have had opportunities to assist scientists and participate on film sets thanks to my iNat activities. iNat also provides a great motivation and reward system for me to get outside and go hiking, which is a good thing to be doing physically. I’m also someone who just loves learning, and I was a Pokémon kid, so there’s an inherent draw to learning about all the organisms around me, and a definite psychological benefit. And my friends now look to me to identify things in nature; it’s kind of fun being a resource person like that.
Plus, more broadly, in the few years I’ve been using iNat intensively, my familiarity with the natural environment has increased massively; I used to walk through the woods and not really see anything around me except “trees, ferns, weeds”. Now every plant I see feels like a familiar face in a crowd, and every piece of the landscape has a relationship to the kinds of organisms I’ve found there in the past. It adds a huge amount of richness and texture to your experience of the natural world.
And now when I travel to a new place, the lack of that ecological familiarity suddenly becomes a huge matter of curiosity and fun that I don’t think I would have felt before. I can wander through what I might once have thought was a fairly flat and uninteresting landscape, and be entertained and captivated for days just in discovering for the first time all the new species and distribution patterns in the area. So it adds richness both to the places you already know, and to the places you’re visiting for the first time.
Every person who commented before me said things that I could have said and said it better than me, so all I have to add to this conversation is that I am brand new to iNat (discovered it via Seek), and I feel like the natural world that I have always loved is now open to me in a new way. I am excited and energized. In the short time I have been on iNat, I have learned so much and my curiosity has been sparked. I think @Thunderhead put it best when she emphasized the aspects of curiosity and play. That is what I have found here in addition to a wealth of knowledge.
I am not a biologist. I live in Borneo, but in an urbanized area that has lots of secondary forest cover. I use iNaturalist to identify:
Plants that I regularly see when hiking in the forest.
Cultivated plants in my garden, so that I could learn more about them to make them grow better.
Cultivated plants in other peoples’ gardens, so that I could know exactly what species to purchase should I feel like cultivating the same plants in my garden.
Garden weeds, so that I could learn how to deal with them.
Bugs in my house, so that I could learn what they are doing in my house and stop fearing them.
Going forwards, I hope to observe local tree species whose timber I purchase for woodwork.
I can answer not for myself (I am biologist) but for a friend of mine, a non-biologist who retired and had no hobby to occupy her for most of the now free time. I introduced her into iNat and she became an avid photo “hunter”, exploring areas around her dwelling place.
i’m a marine biology major, so take my opinion with a grain of salt–
iNat is fun! I find that it encourages people to engage more with the nature around them and take interest in stuff they may have never noticed before, like bugs and “weeds”.
it’s also totally fine to upload infrequently-- there’s no downside to making an account, uploading like one thing, checking on it a few days later, and then not coming back for a while. there’s no algorithm to discourage it like on social media sites. I frequently forget to upload for a month or two because of my studies, and those long breaks don’t impact the amount of IDs i get.
Well, as JFK said, “ask not what your country can do for you…” It frankly never occurred to me to wonder how I benefit from iNat; I joined to add data in the hope it would benefit the natural world by providing information to scientists and others that would help in conservation efforts, and would also make other people more aware of the diversity of life around them, so they would be more informed about, and interested in, preserving it.
So the fundamental reason to join, imo, is because you want to help preseve nature. If your friends aren’t interested in that, then there’s probably not much you can do except try to get them interested in other ways first.
I encourage everyone to use Inaturalist. You don’t have to be in any kind of science to use this app. I think it’s important because it helps those doing research using iNaturalist data. There are so many cities, counties, etc that have very little observations and if lay people in those areas would contribute by posting observations it would be extremely helpful.
Also getting people out in nature and getting them to observe and interact with nature is so crucial to getting people to care about our earth.
I’m just a home gardener and native plant enthusiast and using Inaturalist and gardening for wildlife helped me to get over my fear of wildlife (most insects and some heros).
I’m a vertebrate biologist but my knowledge of botany is rather limited so in that sense I’m an amateur when it come to plants. I value the IDs I get from botanists on iNat which really help me understand those taxa I don’t work with. Same could be said for most invertebrates, lichens, fungi, etc.
Also, one universal benefit that can apply to anyone is that submitting records helps me keep track of what I’ve photo’d where and when. So it’s rather like keeping field notes but in a more organized accessible way.
Keep in mind that professional biologists are not experts in all taxa and can be ignorant of many organisms.
As a non-biologist but camera enthusiast, it motivates me to spend money on more camera gear so I can post photos at a small 2k resolution on iNat. :-)
I started using iNat to go outside more, as if it’s a real-world version of Pokemon Go lol but it turned into a really meaningful to me and interesting way to look at where I am, and get really into wonder about nature and mindfulness, and I’m starting to rope people around me around it (they call me about cool bugs and birds now). And as a bonus it’s expanding my vocabulary in three languages, because I know things from my native language but have no idea what they are in english or in the language of where i live.
Of course I can underline everything that has been said here - but to put it really blunt: iNat is a free website, where you can upload as many photos of (wild) organisms as you want and without being swamped in ads and it even organises the photos for you with map and calendar. Not to forget the identification side. So anybody who is interested enough to ask: hey, what’s this thing? can only benefit from it.
Forgot to say: and you can set the copyright for your photos, which is also quite unusual for the internet.
Just to be clear, you aren’t changing the copyright of the photo, you can add a license to your photos so others can use it, under restrictions laid out by Creative Commons, without their having to ask your explicit permission. It’s a confusing difference, but an important one. FWIW you can choose a Creative Commons license for your photos on Flickr as well.
), you can teach them to sort by different taxon/areas in the explore tab to show them species in their area, use it as a lifelist to document and learn about the different species you come across, as well as learn a thing or two along the way. As for tips, I would tell your friend to not be afraid to ask for help/elaboration, (especially when someone disagrees with your ID). Not only will this teach them how to better ID the species they are observing, but it will also help them better utilize iNat as a tool to do so. Hope that helps :)