---
title: "INaturalist"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INaturalist"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:14:49.208201+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Automated species identification ===
In addition to observations being identified by others in the community, iNaturalist includes an automated species identification tool, first released in 2017. Images can be identified via a computer vision model which has been trained on the large database of the observations on iNaturalist. Multiple species suggestions are typically provided with the suggestion that the software guesses to be most likely is at the top of the list. A broader taxon such as a genus or family is commonly provided if the model is unsure of the species. It is trained once or twice a year, and the threshold for species included in the training set has changed over time. It can be difficult for the model to guess correctly if the species in question is infrequently observed or hard to identify from images alone, or if the image submitted has poor lighting, is blurry, or contains multiple subjects.
In February 2023, iNaturalist released v2.1 of its computer vision model, which was trained on a new source model which performed significantly better than the previous models trained using a different source model. In April 2025 iNaturalist released an updated app for iOS, changing the original version to "iNaturalist Classic."

== Projects ==

Users have created and contributed to tens of thousands of different projects on iNaturalist. The platform is commonly used to record observations during bioblitzes, which are biological surveying events that attempt to record all the species that occur within a designated area, and a specific project type on iNaturalist. Other project types include collections of observations by location or taxon or documenting specific types of observations such as animal tracks and signs, the spread of invasive species, roadkill, fishing catches, or discovering new species. In 2011, iNaturalist was used as a platform to power the Global Amphibian and Global Reptile BioBlitzes, in which observations were used to help monitor the occurrence and distribution of the world's reptiles and amphibian species. The US National Park Service partnered with iNaturalist to record observations from the 2016 National Parks BioBlitz. That project exceeded 100,000 observations in August 2016. In 2017, the United Nations Environment Programme teamed up with iNaturalist to celebrate World Environment Day.. In 2022, Reef Ecologic teamed up with iNaturalist to celebrate World Oceans Day.

=== City Nature Challenge ===

In 2016, Lila Higgins from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Alison Young from the California Academy of Sciences co-founded the City Nature Challenge (CNC). In the first City Nature Challenge, naturalists in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area documented over 20,000 observations with the iNaturalist platform. In 2017, the CNC expanded to 16 cities across the United States and collected over 125,000 observations of wildlife in 5 days. The CNC expanded to a global audience in 2018, with 68 cities participating from 19 countries, with some cities using community science platforms other than iNaturalist to participate. In 4 days, over 17,000 people cataloged over 440,000 nature observations in urban regions around the world. In 2019, the CNC once again expanded, with 35,000 participants in 159 cities collecting 964,000 observations of over 31,000 species. Although fewer observations were documented during the 2020 City Nature Challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic (when the CNC became collaborative as opposed to competitive), more cities and people participated, and more species were found than in previous years.

== Licensing ==
Users have the option to license their observations, photos, and audio recordings in several ways, including for the public domain, Creative Commons, or with all rights reserved. To encourage the sharing of information and to reduce costs, iNaturalist encourages users to license media with Creative Commons licenses. The default license is CC BY-NC, meaning others are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the media as long as appropriate credit is given, changes are indicated, a link to the license is provided, and it is not used for commercial purposes.
Observations and media licensed with Creative Commons licenses are often shared elsewhere, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (excluding share-alike and no derivatives licenses), Atlas of Living Australia, and Wikipedia (excluding noncommercial and no derivatives licenses) through regular imports or user scripts such as iNaturalist2Commons and Wiki Loves iNaturalist.
The iNaturalist website and mobile apps are open-source software released under the MIT License.

== Research ==
As of January 2024, more than 4,000 research papers have been published that cite the iNaturalist research-grade observations hosted on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), often in the fields of ecology, conservation, and climate change. Many articles focus on climate-driven range shifts and expansions. For example: