I’ve always loved nature and being outdoors, and for a number of years, I worked with horses. I used to hunt foxes, rabbits, kangaroos, and ducks, but that’s not something I could stomach anymore. I initially joined iNaturalist for purely personal reasons—mainly because I love photographing nature. I started with amateur landscape photography, which was mostly a side interest for my painting and art as well as posting shots of that sort to Google maps. Eventually, I got a longer lens and began taking more wildlife shots.
At first, I was just storing all my photos on my hard drive or Google Photos, but then I thought, why keep them to myself when others might benefit from them? Even though I’m not a biologist, I’ve come to realise that my photos can contribute in a very small way, to science, so I’ve turned this hobby into something that, in its own way, helps out with research. As long as I find it interesting, I’m happy to keep contributing and learning along the way.
When someone asks if they should create an iNat account, I usually point out that Seek is a good option if they only want to identify things and aren’t interested in mapping observations and interacting with the community. I don’t want to discourage people from joining iNat but Seek exists for a slightly different audience and it’s ok if people want to use the powerful CV identification tools without the full iNat experience.
I honestly didn’t know nature existed. Didn’t notice much of it buried in theatre black boxes and rehearsal rooms, while changing the regime in another country.
Around 2010-2011 I bought my first house in the suburbs and discovered I had a big back yard with no name for anything growing in it. Around the same time I switched from Blackberry to iPhone and got into downloading apps. There was an app with a green bird that reminded me of a bird in a logo of my favorite theatre in Slovenia (both logos are now updated, so the resemblance is less obvious).
Then I realized that the app would maybe help me name the unknown nature phenomena in my back yard, similarly to mikeschinlaub. I posted a couple of obs and Kueda responded. And I started learning: it took me almost a decade to move on from bugs and slugs in my yard, to venturing outside, buying a better camera, learning how to use iNat on my laptop.
For me iNaturalist is primarily an educational enterprise – I have learned more about natural world in the last four years from iNat than from the previous 55+ years of being on this earth. And talking about age (and it’s certainly not something I thought about even a few years ago) iNat is seniors’ best friend, biologists and non-biologists alike:
Keeping curiosity going, learning new things, they say keeps the brain active;
Encouraging physical activity – slow walk with stopping by every blade of grass is not a young, healthy person’s view of exercise, but is another recommended activity for us of, ahem, certain age;
Serving as a motivation to get out of the funk, when it’s dark, and muddy, and drizzly outside;
Being a means of social interaction, not only online, but also meeting other members in person through bio-blitzes and such.
A proverbial curmudgeon, iNat is the ONLY social account (if it counts as such) I have.
If your friend is still reluctant, give them some time, 40 years from now they might come running.
I am in my mid-50s, and watching my parents age, my dad with many, many hobbies and my mom with none (possibly influenced by the fact that she had a much more vibrant professional life than my dad had), I realized that I had to get age-friendly hobbies. iNaturalist is perfect for all the reasons you suggested, and probably more.
Yeah, but those long lenses produce some really nice photos. I’ve been impressed with the ability of fine detail, like lizard head scalation, to remain clear and visible at magnification using some of those fancy camera lenses.
Most of my life, I’ve been a landscape Painter. This took me outdoors (My favourite place!) much of my days, and during breaks, always poked about looking for Insects, etc… Since I became a Va.Master Naturalist in 2014, I’ve discovered iNaturalist and LOVE IT! I’ve learned so very much about Insects particularly and many other Species of Fauna. I never thought of becoming a Biologist, alto’ Nature in all its manifestations has always enchanted me! One needn’t study Biology formally to gain much from the use of iNat.!
I got iNaturalist to help me ID the insects visiting my vegetable garden since I was seeing more than just honeybees like some that were black and others bright green.
From there I got interested in native plants and planted a native pollinator garden so morr plants and insects to ID, then added a birdfeeder for the winter so I wanted to ID the visitors there. And its with me on my hikes and bike rides and when I’m out and about.
Now I’m a bit of an amateur naturalist thanks to iNaturalist, but I’m so very not a professional.
Basically iNaturalist helps me find answers and insightsfor my curiosity driven questions.
There are a lot of ways iNat overlaps with my other hobbies (cycling, photography, travel, lifelong learning), but I think the reason I started really using it more was to be a bit more productive with my scrolling. Social media and news websites are all plastered with ads, not to mention often caught up in heavy topics or petty drama. Scrolling some sort of feed, though, can be helpful for managing anxiety when my mind needs distraction but I’m too keyed up to actually do anything. Soothing repetition, you know? And if I find myself spending more time looking through observations than planned, I’ll at least have contributed some metadata or learned a thing or two in the process.
I don’t have any formal background in biology. I started using iNaturalist after I found Seek when I was working in a garden centre. (It was a useful tool for when people would come in with a picture of a plant they saw in someone else’s garden wanting to know what it was called, or an unknown pest wanting to know how to control it).
I started using Seek on my own time to try to get to know more about the plants and insects around me, mostly because I feel like foraging for food/medicine might be a valuable skill that I don’t want to see lost to time and technology, but quickly realized that there were issues with its accuracy that could be averted by posting on iNat with my best guess and letting humans weigh in. I also learned more that way about how to ID things.
Since then I’ve learned a ton, all of my biology knowledge is pretty much self-taught from books and the internet or learned by pestering people smarter than me
I also practice witchcraft, and a big part of my practice revolves around land stewardship. iNat has been really handy in figuring out what likes to grow where and why, what critters show up where certain things grow etc. It’s very useful for wild harvesting and seed saving as I can check to see if a thing is in the area and when it might be flowering/going to seed. Some friends and I have created a project for ourselves where we can log our spiritual plant allies with custom fields for their correspondences (planetary, alchemical, etc) and traditional/medicinal uses.
What I get out of it now is almost the same feeling I used to get as a child when my mother would order an encyclopedia set and once a month a box would arrive with the next letter or portion of a letter, which is to say a sense of wonder and learning and an awareness that the world is so much larger than I could ever imagine. Just like those wonderful books I remember, iNaturalist makes me quietly introspective and makes my brain tingly with information connections and also makes me a little awkward in that I want to share things and photos with people that are possibly only interesting to me.
Honestly I think Seek is a bit frustrating . We had people use seek for a Bioblitz once and they weren’t too excited with how long it took for it to just get to genus not even identify what they were looking at. So we instead had people use PictueThis if they just wanted to know what the plant was and didn’t really want to keep a record of them and have people help identify them, etc
Lots!
We do driving holidays and weekend excursions. As part of the preparations, I look up geology, flora and fauna, architecture and a bit of a history of the destination we plan to explore. This how I happened across some iNaturalist project summaries with all that has been observed, so I got benefits even before joining.
Swapped binoculars for zoom cameras a couple of years ago. With a half decent camera I had to have a go at photography incuding landscapes, birds and plants. Now I am a contributor to sites I used as a resource, Google Maps first than iNaturalist.
I enjoy talking to people I share an interest with. That was Fragrantica until COVID ruined my nose. I found a new niche and learning some botanical latin is well worth it.
Tips to sign up your friends #1 A bit of reverse psychology: Tell them not to sign up because they’l get hooked and will need rehab or iNatter Anonymus. #2 Tit for tat: Send them photos of flowers and ask them to ID it on iNat. #3 Dare them to find 10 species (taxa) in a day or 100 in a week #4 Share the memes Forum thread
That’s good to know. I’ve really only used it with after-school groups and the kids seemed to have an easy time with it but the field next to the library had mostly weedy plants so it wasn’t a challenging environment.
I’m not a biologist and haven’t studied it since high school. But in all honesty, I saw a video on Youtube from Be Smart that advertised this as “real life Pokemon Go”. Who wouldn’t be convinced by that!? So here I am :) It’s just fun for me, and I get to play real life Pokemon Go
That is an interesting side. (I think a lot of working biologists see iNat as Not Sciency Enough) But we can work well together.
PS I am not a scientist.
I am a scientist and work with a network of scientists. There are certainly those who see iNat as “not sciency” and also those who see it as dangerous to rare species conservation because the locations of rare species could be revealed to potential poachers. While it’s certainly a threat for specific groups like cacti, succulents, orchids, etc, most of our rare species don’t attract enough attention for that to be a problem.
I have helped users identify observations that turned out to be range extensions or other biologically important information for rare species. I’ve also used iNat to contact local users near places where there are old collections or observations that don’t have good enough photos to identify. Some of those people have been able to relocate those plants and collect better observations that can be used for conservation status assessments.
There are plenty of ways that iNat data can be useful for science and conservation. It usually requires sifting through lots of data that aren’t useful for your particular needs but it’s often worth the effort.
There are so many good answers already, so I will skip all the reasons that were previously mentioned and suggest one that may sound a little selfish but still is a good reason to start and contribute. For people who like to travel, especially out in the boonies, iNat can help organize and “tag” the locations. For example, if you go on a lot of hikes, making a dozen(or two) observations will document the route you took. It will also keep track of the date and time. When you switch to the “map view” of your observations, it is pretty cool to see all the location pins! To be totally honest, sometimes I select my hikes based on areas that have no observations, so I can be the first.
