More about iNaturalist
What is iNaturalist?
iNaturalist is a lot of different things, but at its core:
iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.
It's also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool. You can use it to record your own observations, get help with identifications, collaborate with others to collect this kind of information for a common purpose, or access the observational data collected by iNaturalist users.
What it isn't
Not a repository for external data
Our approach towards advancing biodiversity science and conservation is to focus on supporting a large healthy community using the platform to generate, share, explore, and curate data — rather than accruing data. iNat is not a data repository and isn't a good place to drop off external data not generated on the platform. Please check out GBIF as an appropriate repository.
Not a way to back up your photos
We resize and reprocess all photos directly uploaded to iNat. And while we do archive photos from third-party services like Flickr, do not rely on us to keep the original information in photos you add to iNat. Maintain good backups on your own hardware, or use one of the many cloud-based backup solutions out there.
Not a tool for mapping everything
It's not even here to map all ecological phenomena, like rocks, trash, water features, etc. iNaturalist is for recording observations of individual living things, particularly things that can be tied to a species name. It's certainly not here to map your friends, security cameras, recycling bins, etc. If you're interested in those things, try a photo-sharing site, Open Data Kit, or another mapping platform.
Not a way to collect secret information
iNat is fundamentally about sharing information. If law, local policy, personal preference, or the particularities of your project require that you keep information hidden from public view, posting to iNaturalist may not meet your needs. We do perform some limited obscuration of coordinates for sensitive species or by your choice on individual observations. For personal privacy concerns, we recommend Seek by iNaturalist, which by default only stores observations on your device.
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