We all met nature in different ways. Write your spark incident below.
I once saw a treehopper, thought it was poisonous then searches stuff like insect with two horns at front and one at back, then I scrolled through images. It flew. I saw an image of Pyrops candelaria, got interested. Wikipedia said it has ~70 species and I decided I will learn them all. I found iNat while looking for data on that genus. treehoppers, as I later found out, are in different infraorder but etc same suborder, so they were quite related. I made an account to fix a few misids. Literally.
What is your backstory, write it it below. Did you find iNat through nature, or iNat encouraged to look at nature? What came first to you? What sparked the interest?
I organised to explore an area on Mt Wellington in Hobart with a friend but the road was closed due to ice so the two of us wandered out to a nearby lookout. On the way we both got engrossed in photographing Fungi, this prompted me to decide to do something with all the random photos I’ve taken over the years and a distant memory of using iNaturalist back in school led me to check out the site again and upload a few photos
I got addicted, at the end of Fungi season I moved onto plants as that’s been a long term interest of mine despite initially knowing very little about it and things just spiralled from there
I’ve been a nature nerd as long as I can remember. My degree is in Conservation Biology and I’ve had various jobs in the field (as well as quite a few NOT in the field). I’ve been birding since 2004 and got into snorkeling/fish ID in 2011. For my current job I’ve become a botanist, learning the plants of Western Australia. I discovered iNat about 3-4 years ago but immediately went through every photo of a living thing that I’d taken and uploaded them and have added a lot more since.
I’m a conservation ecologist. Been deeply involved in nature and outdoor activities since I could crawl.
Back in grad school we were exploring various citizen science apps as they started to become a thing, and after while exploring various options iNat was released. I was aware of it from shortly after I came out, downloaded it pretty early on, but didn’t actually really start using it much until I took a conservation job overseas a while back.
I found iNat because I was looking for a way to find animal species for a speculative evolution project where we would evolve animals from our neighborhood. Then I decided to contribute myself
I was an amateur photographer. The more I got interested in macro photography, the more I found that small bugs, beetles and spiders were ideal subjects. I loved looking at the photographs of them and seeing things that would be impossible to see with the naked eye. I stumbled across iNat as a way of identifying the things I was photographing. Gradually I got more and more sucked into iNat’s web, and my interest in the subject matter outgrew my interest in the act of photography. For a long while I shunned the label ‘naturalist’ as I didn’t feel I had sufficient knowledge or experience to call myself that. Now, thanks to iNat, I am proud to call myself a naturalist.
I’ve bee a longtime birder and eBird obsessive. I went to the Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine in 2019, and they pushed us to use it. I had it on my phone but hadn’t used it much before then. That began my slow obsession. Now when I hike I’m even slower because I’m not only looking at birds but everything else.
My interest in nature grew gradually. It might have started with seeing some astronomy documentaries when I was a kid. Seeing an awesome aurora on March 13, 1989 pushed me to join an astronomy club. At the same time I explored local trails on my bicycle. Getting a car and a girlfriend (which I married), allowed me to explore even more trails. In 2003, I decided to try to learn birds to make my commute to work more interesting. It took nearly a year for it to really spark with birds. Seeing the mating ritual of the American Woodstock was the spark. I joined a naturalist club, went on club outings to new areas, made some birder friends. In 2005, I felt I needed more than birds and discovered dragonflies. For the next 13 years, I slowly expanded the aspects of nature I would look for as well as upgrading equipment and field guides. At a same time I maintained a website on field guides for Ontario. Then in 2018 I discovered iNaturalist and it suited me. I uploaded pictures dating back to 2008. Joining iNaturalist led me to triple the number of new taxa for myself per year. The only drawback is I find I spend just as much time trying to identify all my sightings on my desktop computer as I spent out in the bush. My rate of discovery hasn’t decreased yet, but the proportion of insects is steadily increasing. Just recently I got interested in leaf miners, and I will resume work on a desktop application for iNaturalist (and other sources such as ebird) this winter. The main feature of this program is to help you create an offline photo collection from your sightings. Click on an image, and the program will put the image in a certain folder, with a constructed filename and watermarked metadata in the image. Lots of work to do on it.
Jacques Cousteau’s Die Geheimnisse des Meeres TV series Started biology interest. But at my Biology Masters study in college, I found Botany so appealing that I’ve always maintained an interest in the Wild Flora
I was in high school and I needed a place to put my observations for animals other than birds, for which I was using eBird. So I guess I somehow stumbled upon iNat. I honestly can’t remember how; I really don’t think any of my classmates knew of it or recommended it
Early in my career, I was about to get laid off and I was given access to a counseling/guidance service. They did some tests and it turned out my ideal job was “marine biologist”. In the end, I didn’t lose my job but I did learn to dive a few years later. Once I was in the water, the I realised the tests were right … I belonged there. And a few thousand pictures later, I needed to identify what I’d seen. Finding iNat was just destiny or karma or whatever those things are that make the universe function smoothly.
I grew up on a farm and always loved animals/nature. I used to roam the woods and fields watching and listening. There were no cell phones to take pictures back then and most people didn’t have a personal camera, but I went to the library and got books. I was the kid who if I found a dead animal I would look for babies and bring them home(much to the dismay of my parents) and acorns, fungi etc into the house to watch(learned not to do that, bugs). I don’t have a degree in anything but I maintained my love of nature. Now that cell phones exist I take pictures and try to google what things are. I started looking for apps that would ID things and found iNat, Ebird and Merlin(birds). Now I take pictures of everything I see and submit it to find out what the smarter people say lol. I’ve had iNat since 2019 and didn’t realize this forum existed until recently.
I am software engineer and iNaturalist was trending on a site called Hackernews and i ignored the entry for a while, until I decided to take a look hours before it was taken off the frontpage! I read the discussion and joined the app that very day, I am very grateful that I didn’t skip the discussion that day.
In general I am a really big fan apps where you do any kind of tracking, i.e. tracking books in goodreads, movies in letterboxd, gramps for my family tree, etc.. and I very quickly become proficient in using these apps and start to become a power user especially if the community encourages power users. so iNaturalist was the perfect match for me.
I started (and I am still very active) on Waarneming.nl, a Dutch website, similar to INat, where you can post your observations. Since Waarneming.nl is very much oriented on the Netherlands, but not so much on the rest of the world, especially outside of Europe.
Because I had quite some observations from outside of Europe which I wanted to identify, I started googling and came across INat, after using it a couple of times, I saw that there were many wrong mollusc identifications, so I started correcting them. Now I also post my observations on this platform.
I was pretty conversant with the flora and fauna of northeastern US where I did my teaching & research, but when I retired to the US Gulf Coast in 2008, everything was different. I had field guides and dichotomous keys but got very frustrated because I couldn’t remember species from one year to next. I spent gobs of time setting up a Filemaker database with pictures and info on what I had seen where, but it was getting out of hand. Then I tried iNaturalist which took over all the organizational work and connected me with real people. This was before it was really good at IDing so I still did most of that myself, but I quickly saw the CV get better and better. iNaturalist just brings everything that matters together.
Years ago at a botanical society field meeting, a professional botanist said something that really stuck with me along the lines of “a day in the field without recording occurrences is a wasted day.” Up until then, I had mostly just been wandering around trying to learn and recognize species for myself.
That mindset shift led me to start logging data in the early 2010s via Tela Botanica (a French collaborative botany network) using their Carnet en Ligne tool.
By the time I left France and was sent on a field trip to Colombia in 2017, the habit of recording was ingrained. Tela Botanica was regional, so I needed a truly global tool. iNaturalist was clearly the best platform available, and I’ve been here ever since.
I forget that you’re also on the Speculative Evolution forum sometimes :p
As for my own backstory, I’ve just always liked bugs, and when I saw a rhinoceros beetle land on the garden table I suddenly remembered “Hey, there’s a website where I can upload pictures like that.” and thus started using iNaturalist. And as a result, my love for bugs has bloomed even further!
When I was 12 years old I found a clitoria mariana plant on a trail in Mammoth Cave National Park. I thought nothing of it at the time, but two years later (a few days ago) I when I was killing time talking to a chatbot I asked it if it thought I had found that plant in the park. It told me that clitoria is not documented to occur in that region, so no. When I told it I had, it said it was a noteworthy discovery and I should document it on INaturalist. I did, and then realized that INaturalist was really cool. Now I’ve started submitting my observations and identifying plants for people. I may be among the youngest members (14 years), as well as the newest (2 days).
For many years before I knew iNat existed, I’ve been uploading my geeky botany and nature photos to Flickr and bugging people there with questions like: “Does anyone know what plant species this is?” I even joined several ID groups during my peak Flickr days.
When I finally decided to give iNat a look and it allowed importing from Flickr, it was like a match meant to be. Here was the place for all my botanicals and associated critters and I didn’t even have to ask for species suggestions or jump through hoops to suggest IDs - that was all built in! And for free!
I spent a few months importing all my Flickr stuff and as they say the rest is history. I still have my Flick account but rarely ever use it now. Actually, the most recent uses of that platform appear to have been uploading images simply for image hosting so I could incorporate them into my iNat Journal entries. The rest is kitties and landscapes and other stuff not suited for iNat.
I’ve always had a baseline interest in animals, but I became actively interested in ants while making a booklet about them for a school project with a friend who kept Camponotus. It was an inciting incident that sent me down a rabbit hole, and I quickly got obsessively into the clade, soon surpassing my friend’s knowledge.
From there, I’ve just been figuring things out as I go. Until quite recently, my knowledge was mostly theoretical since I hadn’t actually gone looking for ants in the wild. However, about a year ago, I started field-anting… And looking for them in person. The rest is history!