This week, we achieved a significant milestone on iNaturalist: passing 3 million observers!

A crucial 5%

While it might not appear so at first glance, the observer community on iNaturalist actually represents a small percentage of the total audience. For instance, this March, approximately 4.5 million people visited the iNaturalist website or used the iNaturalist or Seek mobile apps. Out of these, 600k (13%) had iNaturalist accounts, and only 245k people (~5%) posted observations.

Mapping observers

The maps show the location of first observations for a sample of about 15% of all observers around the globe. About 60% of all observers are in North America. In contrast, South America has about 6% of all observers.

Europe has the second largest number of observers followed by Asia. Africa has the least number of observers of any continent except Antarctica with most observers in the southern part of the continent.

Outsized Oceania

With an area of around 8.5M square kilometers, Oceania is the smallest continent. But it has an outsized number of observers thanks to the active observer communities in Australia and New Zealand.

Thank you!

If you're one of these 3 million observers, thank you for helping us reach this milestone! And if you'd like to join the even smaller, crucial group of iNaturalist supporters (0.05%), you can become one by clicking the link below!

Donate to iNaturalist

We released a new computer vision model today. It has 86,861 taxa up from 84,878. This new model (v2.12) was trained on data exported on February 02, 2024.

Here's a graph of the models release schedule since early 2022 (segments extend from data export date to model release date) and how the number of species included in each model has increased over time.

Thanks to some work by the team described here, we are going to start posting accuracy estimates with these model releases estimated against 1,000 random Research Grade observations in each group not seen during training time. The paired bars below compare average accuracy of model 2.11 with the new model 2.12. Each bar shows the accuracy from Computer Vision alone (dark green), Computer Vision + Geo (geen), and Computer Vision + Geo + Cropping Change (light green). "Cropping Change" is a slight modification to the way images are prepared before they are sent to the CV model that resulted in an average 2.1% improvement.

Overall the average accuracy of 2.12 is 89.1%. You can see the average accuracy varies by taxonomic group and continent from as low as the 60s for Africa and as high as the 90s for Europe and North America. Also note that on average 2.12 is 1.1% more accurate than 2.11 which is consistent with our goal of keeping model accuracy roughly stable as we continue to add thousands of taxa each month (as described here we probably expect <2% variance all other things being equal).

Here is a sample of new species added to v2.12:

• Plants
• Mammals
• Reptiles
• Fungi
• Insects
• Arachnids
• Other animals
• Molluscs
• Chromista
• Amphibians
• Birds
• Fishes