At the freely available iNaturalist.org website, you can share your observations with over 8,000,000 other citizen naturalists all across the planet. Also, you can:
- Identify many of the organisms you encounter, photograph and upload to iNaturalst
- Store notes about where and when the organism was seen, and anything interesting about it
- On a dynamic map, see everywhere the same species has been observed by other iNaturalist observers
- Organize your finds in various ways, such as by the kinds of organisms they are -- all your dragonfly observations in once place, for example -- and where and when your observations were made
- Meet other people with interests similar to yours
- Learn basic facts about the organisms you identify
An iNaturalist app can be installed on your mobile phone, so you can always observe, even when there's no cell reception or wifi.
UPLOADING YOUR OBSERVATIONS IS EASY
Using iNaturalist is so easy that it's possible to start uploading immediately after signing up. However, before uploading anything, it's best to learn a few basics, such as...
- Each "observation" should focus on just one individual, though in your images other individuals may appear beside it.
- For each observation, it's best to upload more than one image, all taken from different angles, and be sure to include unique features, or field marks, to help with the identification process; here is a good example showing several different views.
- When you type a proposed identification into the "Species name" box, wait until the "Loading suggestions" box appears below the name you want to use, and choose it from among the list of suggested names.
More hints on using iNaturalist are discussed on the website's Getting Started page.
Identifying organisms you encounter and photograph
Let's say that at a local park with wild trees and bushes you photograph a knee-high bush bearing clusters of tiny, green flowers, such as seen at the left. Of course you want to know what you've photographed.
You can upload your picture or pictures, either directly from your mobile phone while you're still beside the organism, or else you can store your images for later uploading, maybe putting them on your computer, and uploading them from there.
Once you've uploaded your pictures to iNaturalist, if you're submitting more than one image for the single organism you want to name, first check the "Select All" box, then the "Combine" box, and place your cursor in the "Species name" box. Wait a second or two while iNaturalist's AI, or artificial intelligence, tool examines the pictures. Then below the Species name box the AI tool will open another larger box containing a list of suggested identifications.
If your photos show the mystery organism's main identification features -- such as our park-bush's leaves divided into three leaflets, the leaflets' toothed margins, and the clusters of small, green flowers -- often the first name on the AI app's list turns out to be the correct identification. Other times it makes laughable errors, like confusing a lichen on a rock with an ocean reef coral. However, the AI app is learning, and becoming better all the time.
If you're unsure which of the IDs, if any, is right, copy the first-listed suggestion, and on a second iNaturalist page, perhaps in split-screen mode, paste the name in the search box at the page's top. When you search on that name, you'll go to the named organism's species page, where you can compare your mystery organism with images identified by other iNaturalist users as sharing that name.
Once you've entered a name into the name box, or maybe only the family or order it belongs to, or even if the best you can do is to ID your organism as, for example, a bird, enter that and, in the other boxes add other required information. If you just know that it's a bird, eventually -- if the image shows adequate field marks -- someone somewhere will identify it. When two or more users agree on a name, your observation becomes "Research Grade," though sometimes even Research Grade identifications may be wrong.
At iNaturalist, the naming process is a community effort. The more people who agree on a name, the more likely it is to be right. If you want to be especially sure of a name before you use it, you may need to do lots of sleuthing, and sometimes, as with little brown mushrooms and little black beetles, no one can identify them without dissection or other special analyses.
ONCE YOUR ORGANISM IS IDENTIFIED:
Once you have a name, look it up. You may have field guide books for that, or just plug the name into any search engine search box, and see what comes up. Our park bush shown above was identified as Pacific Poison Oak, Toxicodendron diversilobum. When that name was searched on, the top result was Wikipedia's Toxicodendron diversilobum page. That page uses the scientific name, or binomial, instead of iNaturalist's name Pacific Poison Oak, because the species also is known as the Western Poison Oak. This tells us that when looking up our IDs, usually it's more productive to use the binomial, not a common English name.
That Wikipedia page provides plenty of information, from its distribution area and ecology to its toxicity, the latter section showing a picture of red whelps on someone's skin caused by physical contact with it. It even describes the bush's uses by early indigenous Americans, and how the bush can be a carefully situated component in wildlife gardens, habitat gardens and natural landscaping.
Also on iNaturalist itself, you can look up information about the species by clicking on "Explore" at the page's top, placing the name in the "Species" box. When a larger box appears below the Species box, click on "About" in the box where the name is repeated below it. The resulting page provides access to other members' images identified by that name, and lower down that same page, there's more information -- often public-domain material copied from the species' Wikipedia page.
STARTING/JOINING PROJECTS
Let's say you're someplace like Raipur in India, where you're attending Delhi Public School, and you and your friends want to see what species you can photograph and identify during the "Monsoon Beauty" event held from Aug. 4 to Sep. 17, 2023. You make a "project" where just you and your friends in Raipur can post images and identifications made for that project. Somebody did that, and wherever you are on Earth you can see the species the group came up with at their Monsoon Beauty project page. Note their tiger pictures.
Another project focuses on fungal diversity carried out by the students of Poland's University of Łódź, in the Faculty of Biology and Environmental Protection. You can see their project's observation page featuring, as of this writing, 80 fungus species. On that page, note the map indicating locations of each observation made for this specific project.
Also you can produce a page showing a map highlighting all the places where you yourself have made iNaturalist observations, and exhibiting the pictures you took. For example, take a look at the observation page of user "lauralovebird", a university student especially interested in Canada's migratory wetland birds.
POSTING TO THE iNAT FORUM
Maybe you encounter an organism's name that makes you laugh or scratch your head. You can invite others to report similar names at the iNat Forum. There they already have a discussion going on "Funny, long, or just plain weird animal names."
POSTING TO THE ONLINE JOURNAL
Those contributing observations to iNaturalist, and who have something special to say -- such as providing a list of plants identified at a local park, or announcing the formation of a project involving local naturalists making iNaturalist observations in a given area -- can post on "Everyone's Journal Posts."