INaturalist facts for kids
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| Joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. | |
| Industry | conservation |
| Founded | 2008, California, United States |
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Key people
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Ken-ichi Ueda Scott Loarie Patrick Leary Alex Shepard |
iNaturalist is a website and app where people share what they see in nature. It's a place to post scientific information about plants, animals, and other living things. Users usually share photos of what they saw. They also say where and when they saw it.
iNaturalist works by crowdsourcing. This means many people work together on one big project. Some users are professional scientists. Others are citizen scientists. These are everyday people who want to help science.
iNaturalist shares its information with groups like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. These groups watch over animals and plants that are in danger. iNaturalist users can also help park rangers. They can find and identify invasive species. These are plants or animals that don't belong in an area and can harm it. For example, they might spot kudzu. Park rangers often know an invasive plant is in their park. But iNaturalist helps them find its exact location. Then, they can gather people to remove it.
Many countries use iNaturalist. This includes the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Parks, conservation groups, and research teams all use it.
Contents
The Story of iNaturalist
Students at the University of California at Berkeley started iNaturalist in 2008. It began as a project for their master's thesis. Since 2014, the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society have run iNaturalist together.
How the Platform Works
People often use their smart phones to share information with iNaturalist. They usually upload photos of what they've found. Then, other users on the website help identify what is in the picture. This way, everyone learns more about nature.
Discovering Nature with Seek
In 2020, iNaturalist launched a smaller app called Seek. With Seek, you can point your phone at a plant or animal. The app will then try to tell you its name. Seek uses a special computer model. This model learns from all the observations shared by the iNaturalist community. So, the hard work of thousands of people on iNaturalist helps Seek work!
Related Pages
Images for kids
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Seek's home page, showing local species and the Challenge for November 2021.
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Using the iNaturalist app
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This graph shows how iNaturalist activity has grown over time. The green line shows the number of species observed. The black line shows the number of confirmed observations.
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This chart shows the different types of living things observed on iNaturalist as of January 2022.
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This chart shows where observations on iNaturalist come from around the world as of January 2022.
See also
In Spanish: INaturalist para niños
