What is iNaturalist?
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.
However, despite the fact that iNat can be a bit technical and seems scientific, our primary goal in operating iNaturalist is to connect people to nature, and by that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance, and is worth protecting. We have a pretty nerdy way of doing that, of course, but we really believe that recording information about nature in a social context is a tremendous way to understand the awesome depth and breadth of life on Earth.
Our secondary goal is to generate scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters. We believe iNat can achieve both of these goals simultaneously - in fact that they reinforce one another - but when we get pulled in conflicting directions, we measure success by our primary goal. If we connect people to nature without contributing to any specific scientific outcomes or quantifiable conservation results, then we're still doing our job, but if we just contribute to science without helping people care about the natural world, we’ll be on the wrong track.
