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 an American website where people post scientific information about plants, animals and other living things. Usually, they send photographs of which living things they saw and say where and when they saw them.
iNaturalist works by crowdsourcing, by asking many, many people to work on the project. Some of the people who send information to iNaturalist are professional scientists and some are citizen scientists, ordinary people who want to help scientific projects. iNaturalist sends information to International Union for the Conservation of Nature and other projects that watch endangered animals and other populations. iNaturalist users can help park rangers and other people who work in forests find and identify invasive species, for example kudzu. According to one park ranger from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the United States, rangers usually already know an invasive plant is in their park, but iNaturalist and programs like it help them find out exactly where it is. Then they can gather people to remove it.
Parks, conservation programs and research teams in many countries have used iNaturalist, for example the United States, Canada and New Zealand.
Contents
History
Students at the University of California at Berkeley founded iNaturalist in 2008. It was a master's thesis project. Since 2014, the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society have run iNaturalist together.
Platform
People use their smart phones to look at or send information to iNaturalist, usually photographs. Then other users on the website figure out what the is in the picture.
Seek
In 2020, iNaturalist launched a smaller program called Seek. Users with Seek can point their phones at a plant or animal and the program will try to tell them its name. According to iNature's Tony Iwane, "Seek's machine-learning model is based entirely on observations from . . the iNaturalist community, so it's really the hard work of thousands and thousands of people on iNaturalist that enables Seek to function."
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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Semi-log plot of annual changes in number of species observed (in thousands; green) and number of 'verifiable' (i.e. no penalties in data quality assessment) observations (in millions; black).
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Relative proportions of verifiable observations according to taxonomic group as of January 2022
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Relative proportions of verifiable observations according to continent as of January 2022
See also
In Spanish: INaturalist para niños
