opisska
rabid twitcher
The iNaturalist website has been mentioned in various threads already at many occasions, but I think it is about time we talk more in deailt about how great it is and specifically about how fun it is to use. This already is a warning: the site is not really well suited to the serious birder for example: if you go to your sites with a notebook, recording all birds "scientifically", then there is eBird and whatnot for you and you would probably pull or your remaining hair out trying to log anything reasonably on iNaturalist. If, on the other hand, you like to take things more casually, preferably while taking pictures of anything you see - and if you are interested in things beyond birds, iNaturalist is simply great and I don't think there is any other site that would come even remotely close to it.
For the people who are not familiar with iNat, as that's how we casually call it, it's a platform where you can post your observations of anything living. The by far easiest and definitely central way how to do so is to upload pictures. You can put in also undocumented observations, but those will be left at the sidelines and not subject to most of the functionality of the site. You can upload pictures from your cellphone using the app or you can upload them from the PC, even many years back. The default interface has you simply drag and drop any number of pictures - it then tries to get time, location and possibly the ID (if stored in filename or a proper tag) from the pictures. You can set locations manually, for one picture of for a selection, and you can give it an uncertainty of any magnitude, even thousands of kilometers, but that's obviously less preferable - but it means you can put in old pictures for which you have only a general idea of the exact site.
The site has a pretty smart AI that will give you its opinion on the ID, if it's not pre-written in the file by you. This AI is mind-blowingly good for some things, such as most of the birds, a little less good for difficult stuff like herps and if the photo is tricky, it may get even the kingdom wrong - so you have to check it. But even if you don't, the next great thing comes into play: everyone can see your observation and add their idea of the ID - the "community taxon" is then determined democratically from those IDs. And that's where it becomes awesome: many people who give out a lot of IDs, are experts in the field they have chosen to do IDs in. I knew nothing about corals going into iNat and now all my coral photos have been reviewed by a guy who wrote the most comprehensive book on Indo-pacific corals ever written - just like that!
This, in my opinion, is the core benefit of iNat and allows you to start getting smoothly into things you would never even think that you could start IDing. With iNat, you can just decide by a snap of a finger that you are doing fungi or plants or insects now ... anything you can point or have ever pointed your camera at! - with absolutely zero knowledge and just upload them all with the AI IDs and sit down and just enjoy the IDs coming, browse the taxonomic tree that's growing in front of you - and start learning about all the species you have inadvertently seen already! You can also discuss things with other people - especially those who gave you an ID - and most of the time they are very eager to do so and that's also a great way to learn.
To make it more fun, iNat allows you to see your own lifelist, even in a frankly little convoluted way (you can't for example quickly see number of species per category) and to make it even more fun, you can see the lists of other people. You can also search for observations of whatever you want in any region, country, or rectangular area - and you can also look up the 500 most active observers of that. It's sorted by number of observations, but you can sort those people by number of species - this isn't a perfect raking list (because people with very few observation per each species can get left out) but it works well for a lot of things, especially when restricted to a combination of taxa/regions with less contributors. You can also easily see some more statistics, such as overall number of entries and species for each taxonomical leaf in the tree.
Overall, there are now over 58 million observations in the database, 23 million of plants, 31 million of animals, out of which 12 million are of vertebrates and of those 8.5 million of birds. Birds are the "most explored" category on iNat, with astounding 9942 species already observed, which is the biggest covered fraction of any category - you can get a breakdown of this statistics across taxa in this blog entry. Amazingly, this huge coverage is really a collective effort as the best bird species collector there has "only" 4190 species - so many competitive listers have a clear opportunity to score a top position here - and if I ever manage to upload all my birds, I will be 9th in this ranking! This gets even better in other categories, when you select the conditions right - not only am I already 20th worldwide in mammals (and on the way to 10th position when I finish all my species), I am also for example already no.1 in mammal species in Poland
(you have to order by species manually to see that).
In summary, iNaturalist is a great project and we have had enormous fun wading through all our photos from all corners of the world and discovering that we have already seen a plenty of cnidarians, so many kinds of insects and actually a really fair selection of world's butterflies. I want everyone to know about it in case they would enjoy doing the same and are missing out on the fun right now!
For the people who are not familiar with iNat, as that's how we casually call it, it's a platform where you can post your observations of anything living. The by far easiest and definitely central way how to do so is to upload pictures. You can put in also undocumented observations, but those will be left at the sidelines and not subject to most of the functionality of the site. You can upload pictures from your cellphone using the app or you can upload them from the PC, even many years back. The default interface has you simply drag and drop any number of pictures - it then tries to get time, location and possibly the ID (if stored in filename or a proper tag) from the pictures. You can set locations manually, for one picture of for a selection, and you can give it an uncertainty of any magnitude, even thousands of kilometers, but that's obviously less preferable - but it means you can put in old pictures for which you have only a general idea of the exact site.
The site has a pretty smart AI that will give you its opinion on the ID, if it's not pre-written in the file by you. This AI is mind-blowingly good for some things, such as most of the birds, a little less good for difficult stuff like herps and if the photo is tricky, it may get even the kingdom wrong - so you have to check it. But even if you don't, the next great thing comes into play: everyone can see your observation and add their idea of the ID - the "community taxon" is then determined democratically from those IDs. And that's where it becomes awesome: many people who give out a lot of IDs, are experts in the field they have chosen to do IDs in. I knew nothing about corals going into iNat and now all my coral photos have been reviewed by a guy who wrote the most comprehensive book on Indo-pacific corals ever written - just like that!
This, in my opinion, is the core benefit of iNat and allows you to start getting smoothly into things you would never even think that you could start IDing. With iNat, you can just decide by a snap of a finger that you are doing fungi or plants or insects now ... anything you can point or have ever pointed your camera at! - with absolutely zero knowledge and just upload them all with the AI IDs and sit down and just enjoy the IDs coming, browse the taxonomic tree that's growing in front of you - and start learning about all the species you have inadvertently seen already! You can also discuss things with other people - especially those who gave you an ID - and most of the time they are very eager to do so and that's also a great way to learn.
To make it more fun, iNat allows you to see your own lifelist, even in a frankly little convoluted way (you can't for example quickly see number of species per category) and to make it even more fun, you can see the lists of other people. You can also search for observations of whatever you want in any region, country, or rectangular area - and you can also look up the 500 most active observers of that. It's sorted by number of observations, but you can sort those people by number of species - this isn't a perfect raking list (because people with very few observation per each species can get left out) but it works well for a lot of things, especially when restricted to a combination of taxa/regions with less contributors. You can also easily see some more statistics, such as overall number of entries and species for each taxonomical leaf in the tree.
Overall, there are now over 58 million observations in the database, 23 million of plants, 31 million of animals, out of which 12 million are of vertebrates and of those 8.5 million of birds. Birds are the "most explored" category on iNat, with astounding 9942 species already observed, which is the biggest covered fraction of any category - you can get a breakdown of this statistics across taxa in this blog entry. Amazingly, this huge coverage is really a collective effort as the best bird species collector there has "only" 4190 species - so many competitive listers have a clear opportunity to score a top position here - and if I ever manage to upload all my birds, I will be 9th in this ranking! This gets even better in other categories, when you select the conditions right - not only am I already 20th worldwide in mammals (and on the way to 10th position when I finish all my species), I am also for example already no.1 in mammal species in Poland
(you have to order by species manually to see that).In summary, iNaturalist is a great project and we have had enormous fun wading through all our photos from all corners of the world and discovering that we have already seen a plenty of cnidarians, so many kinds of insects and actually a really fair selection of world's butterflies. I want everyone to know about it in case they would enjoy doing the same and are missing out on the fun right now!
