Howdy. If you're just getting started with iNat, check out Getting Started guide to tour some of the site's features. If you have a question about the site, please peruse the FAQ below. If you're still looking for answers, please post your question to our Google Group.
iNaturalist provides a place to record and organize nature findings, meet other nature enthusiasts, and learn about the natural world. It encourages the participation of a wide variety of nature enthusiasts, including, but not exclusive to, hikers, hunters, birders, beach combers, mushroom foragers, park rangers, ecologists, and fishermen. Through connecting these different perceptions and expertise of the natural world, iNaturalist hopes to create extensive community awareness of local biodiversity and promote further exploration of local environments.
iNaturalist was originally the Master'ss Final Project of Nathan Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda at UC Berkeley's School of Information. Currently Ken-ichi maintains the project, with occasional help and guidance from Nate.
iNaturalist is built using Ruby on Rails, MySQL, jQuery and Google Maps, and Flickr. It also utilizes the Catalogue of Life and uBio data sources for taxonomic data.
You can help iNaturalist by giving us your feedback; join our Google group to sign up for usability studies, report bugs, and request new features. You can also help iNaturalist by adding your observations and helping other community members identify their unidentified observations. If you know how to code and want to help work on some features, fork us on GitHub!
You can contact us at help@inaturalist.org
iNat admins are the people who run the site. They have direct access to the underlying code and the database, and they can change anything on the site.
Curators are iNat users who volunteer to help keep our taxonomic data up to date. If you're interested in becoming a curator, please contact us. Curators can also promote other users to curator status. Please only promote people you trust and that you know to have some taxonomic knowledge.
You know it when you see it, right? Stuff that violates Section 2 of our Terms of Service is definitely inappropriate and worth flagging or otherwise notifying the admins about. Milder forms of rudeness are unfortunate, but probably not something we'll delete. Observations of pets, captive animals, humans, and other organisms most naturalists may not find interesting are ok (they're alive, after all). Observations of things that aren't organisms are a gray area. Things that clearly have nothing to do with nature, like what someone had for lunch, are worth flagging and may be deleted, but evidence of pollution or disturbance could be interesting, and probably won't be removed.
An observation is the what, where, and when of a finding in nature. iNaturalist provides a place to add this information along with associated text, photos, and tags. iNaturalist encourages the recording of all nature findings, whether they feature identified species or simple narrative descriptions. (In iNaturalist the same lizard can be described as a Desert Horned Lizard as well as "Mystery Lizard of Death Valley".)
iNaturalist has name information for mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, and continues to add new species names into our database. If we do not recognize a particular name, try alternative names that we might recognize and add the original name to the tags or description fields.
Check the "ID Please" checkbox when adding / editing your observation and your observation will appear in ID Please.
iNaturalist can link directly to the Flickr photo service so that you can add your Flickr photos to your observations. When you agree to link your Flickr account, you are simply linking two accounts; we do not have access to your Flickr password and you are not forsaking your copyright nor giving us the ability to use any of your photos in ways that you do not want.
We also support Picasa: Configure your Picasa account »
We also support uploading photos directly to iNat, but it can be a bit slow, so we only allow one upload at a time. Using Flickr or Picasa is probably faster if you already use those services.
Tags are keywords you can add to an observation to make them easier to find. For example, if a barracuda followed you on a scuba diving trip in Turks and Caicos, you might tag the observation "scary, barracuda, scuba diving, vacation, turks and caicos".
Sure, check out our Observations Widget.
Photos attached to observations should be of the individual observed at the time of the observation. If you record an observation of a tree, then go back a day later to take a picture, please add a new observation for the picture, because it represents the tree at a different point in time.
Please do not upload pictures you didn't take unless you have obtained permission from the photographer. It is illegal to publish copyrighted works without some form of license granted by the creator of the work, and all photographers have full copyright over their photos by default. If the photo was of the thing you observed, and someone else took it and you've obtained their permission to publish it, you should also note the name of the photographer in the observation's description.
Geoprivacy is a setting you can make on your observations that controls how the spatial coordinates (latitude and longitude) are displayed. Here are the options:
Note that curators of individual projects can always see the coordinates regardless of your geoprivacy setting, so if you are concerned about who has access to the coordinates you should be sure you trust the curators of the projects in which you participate.
When coordinates are obscured it means that a random point within 10KM of the true coordinates is shown publicly (i.e. on the home page, the observations page, and project pages), while the true coordinates are only visible when you are viewing your own observations (i.e. on the individual project pages and the list of your own observations). Note that curators of the projects to which you've added an observation can also see the true coordinates. Obscured coordinates should always be symbolized by circular marker without stems on maps and in geospatial feeds.
Coordinates are automatically obscured for all taxa that are "NEAR THREATENED" or worse according to the IUCN Red List. Some taxa may be declared threatened according to other conservation authorities, and some may be simply marked as threatened by iNat site curators if they believe it merits protection.
You can also obscure the coordinates of your own observations regardless of what the taxon is. See geoprivacy above.
The data quality assessment is a summary of an observation's accuracy. All observations start as "casual" grade, and achieve "research" grade when
Observations will revert to "casual" grade if the above conditions aren't met or
A life list is a list of every species that you have seen. Every iNaturalist user has a life list and these lists are automatically populated from the observations added to iNaturalist.
While the life list is automatically populated from added observations, the species will not be added to this list if iNaturalist does not recognize the name you used. We recommend trying alternative names that we might recognize.
