I’ve been on iNaturalist for a while—29,000 observations, 29,000 IDs—and I still remember the moment it really clicked for me.
One rainy afternoon in Mindo, Ecuador, a friend showed up unannounced with a grin, a rain jacket, and a daypack. He introduced me to iNaturalist. I was skeptical; I hate apps. But a morning at a tiny orchid garden changed everything. Suddenly, my photos weren’t just images—they were data. Observations. Part of a global community.
I’m a retired professional biologist. Starting to use iNaturalist opened up ways to learn about moths and leafminers and galls, groups I couldn’t have tackled easily on my own. It gave me a reason to go explore new places, even the “ordinary” places near where I live. It allows me to “give back,” because I make lots of IDs of common species, many for relatively new naturalists.
It makes me look harder and appreciate more everything in nature, not just the showy birds and conspicuous flowers. I’ve met wonderful people through iNaturalist and those people expand my world even more. It has allowed me to contribute to scientific research, certainly in my own region, but even when I travel. At this point, I cannot imagine my life without iNaturalist!
I’d had iNaturalist suggested to me as a way to get plant IDs as I tried to learn about the flora of the Grampians, but rejected the idea because I wanted to do it myself, thank you very much!
What made me join was actually also meeting someone with an iNat story, in this case of a friend (I think?) uploading a photo of an insect on their door that turned out to be something new. That inspired me to join to start uploading some of the non-plant photos I’d been taking out of interest with no intention of doing anything with them. I quickly got sucked into identifying plants of the Grampians (since I’d been doing the same with my own photos for a few years already!), mostly because I found wrongly identified observations and wanted to fix them… Since then, I’ve gradually started branching out. Not quite up to 100K IDs, but getting there. Oh, and I do now upload plant photos too - with my own IDs if possible, but sometimes even if I can’t ID to species.
It’s been seriously dangerous to my already slow walking pace and made me realise just how much I’d been missing even when I thought I was paying attention. Springtails, anyone?
I love your article. It’s nice to see another person who “hate[s] cell phones and apps.” I wish more people who wrote about iNaturalist would stop referring to it as “an app to identify plants,” because it’s so much more than that.
Amy typed a nice authentic response, but that thread is locked, so I will respond here:
Ditto. I find iNaturalist incredibly confusing and user UN-friendly. Not blaming anyone. I know staff are doing their best to improve this all the time.
In 2023, I was an intense birder. I still am, of course, but that year really was something else. Anywhere I went, if I saw a bird (and I did), I’d make an eBird checklist. One day I got an E-Mail from one of my birding newsletters, and I noticed iNat was mentioned in a part about a moth or grasshopper or something. I thought nothing of it, and knew there were other sites like eBird, and so clicked off and went along my day.
I finished 2023 with 151 bird species in my year list, most of them lifers.
I expected 2024 to be much the same. I found 10 or 11 bird species on January 1st, a good start to me. Fast forward to April of that year, and I was for some reason (don’t ask me why, I don’t know why) looking at where red trilliums were found. All the maps were really zoomed out, but I wanted to know where specifically I could see them where I live. Then I remembered that E-Mail, the one with the iNatted moth, and so went to iNaturalist.org and looked up red trillium. And then white-tailed deer. And goldenrod. And elderberry.
And so, when I walk into the woods, I look in more directions then up. Thank you, iNat. You have prevented many falls by forcing me to look where I’m going.
It’s wacky to visit an orchid garden where I live, and about 50% of the orchids are found within a mile or two of the garden, while others are from distant lands (well, mostly in Ecuador though). When I see clusters of orchid pics around the tourist-visited orchid gardens, I go through them and–because I know my local area well–mark many as ‘cultivated’, knowing they are not from the area. Although technically, all of the orchids in the orchid garden are ‘culivated’, except for the 10 species or so that just arrive naturally in the trees of the garden.
so funny–the only time i use the app is to click a quick photo with my phone. i prefer the website: it is so much easier to understand iNaturalist via the website. I give live presentations about iNaturalist with an internet connection–and the website is incredible for doing that. Great for teaching.
Joining iNaturalist was not as inevitable as next Christmas but almost so.
I bought a bridge camera for snapping birds and found Orchids as the next photographic challenge. Looking up flora and fauna of day trip and holiday destinations often landed me on iNat project summary pages.
Once I started asking people what is that I took photos of, everyone suggested iNat or affiliated apps. I joined soon after.
I learned a lot but I can’t say iNaturalist had as much impact as educating myself about geology and the forces, including living organisms, that shape the landscape we see.
I did learn to see us people in different ways though but that’s a different story.
I don’t understand why people are so negative when the experience other people are having doesn’t match their preferences.
Experts were understandable concerned about data quality in the beginning. After numerous studies showing that citizen science data is good, fewer of them are. And now iNat is a major contributor to research.
