iNaturalist Classic

I’m just a 20 year old that wants to know what every creatures purpose is around me and this has been the most fun way to do it. There are no ads, you upload a picture of the animal of reasonable quality, it helps if there’s multiple pictures and you describe what you saw in the description area. You put your location, which can be moved around so that your location isn’t known. It’s important to note that the location is key in determining a species sometimes so be decently accurate on the location. Once you’ve done that, AI, that’s right, artificial intelligence studies the pictures and compares them to other picture alike and species in the area to often give you a suggestion that’s correct or another 10 suggestions below of which I usually find the species I’m looking for if it’s not too obscure. I’ve also contributed to the knowledge of where some species are which feels great. My only complaint is there’s no place to provide feedback but here and the upload speed is reasonably slow. But this is a wonderful app that I recommend for any biologist. Yes, you can submit species under the microscope, too!!!! Thank you California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society for helping create this app!!!

I really love this app and use it pretty much daily since I’ve downloaded it. It’s great to have with you to quickly identify a species using the picture instead of having to go and google the characteristics of what you saw and hope it knows what you mean. I would like to see them update it with a section where you can go to a person’s profile and see all of their observations in one place like the way you view a project and all of its observations. Perhaps even add an option to follow a particular person and then see all the observations of people you follow in a feed. You can do kinda already do this but you have to search for the person and then be confined to whatever given map area you have on your screen. I think it would be better to have all of them on one page because sometimes I come across an observer whose observations I like (camera quality, focus on a specific species, or just like their observations) and I want to see all of them. Also, they should add a place where you can view all of the observations you’ve added to your favorites.

I love inat. I use it all the time. The taxonomy suggestions are almost always on point. I use it to explore areas I already am familiar with too to learn about the things living around me I’ve never heard of. Even the projects and guides are cool, because I can see which species in a group are most commonly encountered based on how many times they’ve been observed compared to others. The range maps you get for species etc are dynamic. BUT, the social component to me is abysmal. “Leaderboard?” No one cares. It’s a meaningless statistic. I’d like to be able to see who is observing similar things to me in an area. Who is consistently identifying a specific phylum or genus? (Not me lol). They should be acknowledged as someone with some knowledge in that area. I know inat has powerful algorithms capable of identifying species based on photos - use some of those algorithms to connect peoples’ observational powers and curiosity. Sometimes I observe something that scientist haven’t completely determined what subspecies lives in my specific area- why can’t scientists send out questions for people to find out? Don’t know the southernmost extent of a plant? Ask people who have observed it before and live in the area to look for it.This is a powerful app for taking citizen science to the next level. I’d love to see what they can do.

I’ve been using this app to keep track of all of my insect & plant observations locally. 213 observations to date. Unfortunately, over the years, I’ve had to deal with a lot of local misogynists & racially insensitive comments on my own page along with my observations showing up as blanks as of this morning. I finally reported this to the admin today after being harassed about an insect post comment from over a year ago this morning. I was told via email, that I can only block 3 people within this app (which I couldn’t today, because I already tried this morning) and in the response email, it was even admitted that their admin may come off as condescending due to language issues. Okay, we’ll since I am multi-lingual, I found that response from, “Tony”, who assumed I only speak American English, to be odd. If they know that language is an issue for a given person, then update the app & list people’s preferred language(s) on each of their pages. The app has on multiple occasions given me wrong identifications due to scientific names versus nicknames for any given observation (queue the misogynist responses) & I’m fairly certain languages tie into that. There is also what I call coded language in many of the comments in this app. I would probably be very cautious in letting children use this app with all the adult men that clearly use the app for more than observations.