[HN Gopher] iNaturalist
___________________________________________________________________
iNaturalist
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 291 points
Date : 2026-04-03 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inaturalist.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inaturalist.org)
| simonw wrote:
| The iNaturalist API is an absolute gem. It doesn't require
| authentication for read-only operations and it has open CORS
| headers which means it's amazing for demos and tutorials.
|
| My partner and I built this website with it a few years ago:
| https://www.owlsnearme.com/
|
| (I realize this is a bit on-brand for me but I also use it to
| track pelicans https://tools.simonwillison.net/species-
| observation-map#%7B%... )
| andrewpedelty wrote:
| I also love the Seek app that they provide (maybe this overlaps
| with the linked app in functionality?). As someone who's grown
| fonder of Nature in general over the last decade but who has
| little actual knowledge of the regional flora and fauna, it's a
| great way to engage with the plants and little bugs in my
| garden (or others' while on walks and such).
|
| Fun to travel and "pokemon" some new local stuff too.
| Tomte wrote:
| Seek throws up a ,,please don't disturb nature" modal at
| every single start that you need to click away. Usually at
| that point the bird has gone away, too.
|
| The iNaturalist app doesn't. It has more features, but Seek's
| former advantage ,,let me just the a photo and auto-identify"
| is now in the iNaturalist main app, as well, so it is my
| default now.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| >Seek throws up a ,,please don't disturb nature" modal at
| every single start that you need to click away.
|
| Frustration shared.
| throwanem wrote:
| So the modal is doing its job.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Sure, it's "doing its job" much in the way a podcast
| advert you've already heard 1000 times is "doing its
| job".
| throwanem wrote:
| I keep hearing people speak so positively of "friction,"
| lately, and yet. Some more nuance required in that
| discussion, I think.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Making the user completely inured to its message is not
| doing its job
| andrewpedelty wrote:
| That's great to know, I'll give it a shot for sure.
| zem wrote:
| wow, that would be my cue to uninstall the app and write
| zeros repeatedly over the place it used to be!
| ingonealan3 wrote:
| This guy deletes!
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| I've been pretty disappointed in the seeks applications
| ability to identify vegetation or insects. It seemed like it
| was really good a year or two ago and now I just seem to get
| so many bad predictions.
| chhxdjsj wrote:
| I stopped using seek and just started using gemini...
| Galanwe wrote:
| My son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !
| jw_cook wrote:
| It is a gem. There are all kinds of fun location/organism-
| specific tools you can put together with the public read-only
| data, and owlsnearme is a good example of that. I just used it
| to check my area and learned there are snowy owls nearby, which
| is new to me!
|
| The iNat API certainly has some quirks and shortcomings, but in
| terms of usability it's uncommonly good compared to most
| biodiversity platforms. I maintain the python API client[1],
| which is used for data visualizations, doing useful things with
| your own observation data (which is how I got into it), Jupyter
| notebooks, Discord bots, and some research/education workflows.
|
| [1] https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist
| martior wrote:
| And I made this silly game. Name the beast, where you get a
| picture and try to guess (or know) the scientific name.
| https://name-the-beast.skabb.com
| simonw wrote:
| OK I absolutely love that!
|
| I got 0/4 though on the easiest difficulty level. Feature
| request: a version where you have to guess the common name
| instead, I think that would still be fun.
| 9dev wrote:
| Incredible. 7 owls near me! Thank you both for this, love it
| very much.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| I know this app!
|
| I once used it to check whether it would identify some birds
| that are prevalent in my area.
|
| Not related to the app's fubctionality, but it was pretty funny
| when I replayed my recording of parrot noises to crop it and
| the next moment, a walnut shell dropped from the tree above.
|
| Animals apparently don't like being recorded!
| Litost wrote:
| I use iNaturalist semi-regularly and was about to start using
| it for a rewilding project I'm involved in, so looked into that
| and some of the alternatives.
|
| I really like how easy it is to use, the various views on the
| data (incl. geofenced projects and places), the fact you can
| export it all back out again, the volunteer and "AI" assist on
| IDing stuff etc.
|
| But I guess the main other pro for me was that, in the UK at
| least, most of the data I've put into iNaturalist that's made
| Research Grade has also been imported into iRecord and NBNAtlas
| which wouldn't happen the other way round, so 3 for the price
| of 1. See https://nbn.org.uk/inaturalistuk/inaturalistuk-and-
| its-place...
|
| I know there's various grumblings about observation quality
| from iRecord users relating to iNaturalist records, but I'm
| assuming this is people just not following the published
| guidance???
| two-sandwich wrote:
| This was a lifesaver around 2020 for me, documenting local
| critters and chatting about them. I've had immense satifaction in
| sharing my excitement for wildlife with others.
|
| Great app, easy interface, friendly community. Thank you
| iNaturalist team!
| justonceokay wrote:
| This app sparked a kind of existential change for me, also
| during the pandemic. I realized taking these long walks around
| Seattle that I didn't know almost any of the plants. The "ah
| ha" moment was that I realized at any point almost 50% of my
| visual field was dominated by things I didn't even know the
| names of. As a curious engineer this is not acceptable.
|
| So I would take walks and try to identify any plant I didn't
| know. The first day I didn't even make it around the block.
| Over the course of moths I got better and could go a few miles
| before spotting a (native) plant I had no idea about. Now I
| know when most flowers bloom, what's wdible, what's poisonous,
| what's related, and it's fun to share with other plant people
| too.
|
| Seattle is such a beautiful place to learn about plant life,
| since it is so temperate the city is like a world tree museum.
| Almost any kind of tree that doesn't prefer desert will grow
| here and people over the centuries have planted many unique and
| exotic varieties.
| daemonologist wrote:
| iNaturalist is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if they released
| their models.
| frontierkodiak wrote:
| See my other comment in this thread! I've got you covered;
| launching open models in ~1month. Happy to answer any
| questions!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Similar category: Merlin Bird ID [1]. Uses audio to identify the
| birds around you.
|
| [1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
| derwiki wrote:
| Aaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun
| https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The funny thing is I got into birds because of the app. I
| hike alone often. Identifying the bird and then challenging
| myself to identify it correctly from memory going forward
| (before double checking with the app) is a fun game that
| draws one into the environment. Then, once you remember the
| bird (or, in my case, whatever nickname I came up with) you
| start learning and remembering facts about the bird.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Even if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite
| things I've ever watched.
| bix6 wrote:
| Best movie of the year hands down
| bobbiechen wrote:
| I'm a big fan of Merlin and learning more about its development
| changed my perspective on software development! I wrote about
| that here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-
| backends-can...
| bikelang wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. I love Merlin but never knew how
| they got it to be so good. Blood, sweat, and tears - of
| course - as everything actually valuable and useful requires.
| kiproping wrote:
| There's Merlin and then there's Birdnet too
| https://birdnet.cornell.edu/. Both by Cornell.
| dunham wrote:
| I've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet
| connection to do the identification and sometimes that is
| dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also
| birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)
|
| I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download
| the network for offline use.
| rurp wrote:
| Requiring an internet connection for a nature app is
| absurd. As annoying as it is I get why a big tech company
| like Google fails at this sort of thing, many of their
| employees probably never leave a city and so the products
| always work well for them. But a nature app has no excuse,
| normal usage will get blocked by that all the time.
| meta-meta wrote:
| That's what Merlin is for but it's a ~450mb install.
| BirdNet is only a ~30MB install and birds are everywhere,
| so what's wrong with having an online option for most
| people who spend most of their time within range of a cel
| tower?
| tejtm wrote:
| birdnet pi or go run the model locally with an option to
| push observations back to Cornell
|
| https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi
|
| https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Merlin is great for identifying birds, but I could never
| understand how to just post the information to the community
| for them to verify the observation. Compared to Seek /
| iNaturalist I find the uploading process complicated and I
| still have no idea how to do it.
| skyberrys wrote:
| I send things too iNaturalist all the time, it's great, it really
| helped me learn about my local fauna. I want to do a project with
| their API to identify a couple hundred wildflower photos I've
| been hoarding. Would that work? ( Idea is my wildflower app could
| send to their models to confirm my original identification)
| jw_cook wrote:
| I've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV
| model isn't public and can't be used through their API.
| contingencies wrote:
| Yet they shelter under a 'Science' tax-break. It's
| duplicitous. They should publish their models and build
| process. If it's not available for replication, it's not
| science.
| Taipan_Enigma wrote:
| Are their models considered to be the best or is there some
| competition? For plant identification, they blow every other
| free app I have tried out of the water. It also seems to
| return the genus of a plant rather than misidentify the
| species which I find impressive.
| jw_cook wrote:
| IMO it's best-in-class. The next best thing might be
| google's speciesnet: https://github.com/google/cameratrapai
| skyberrys wrote:
| That's too bad, maybe I can upload it to iNaturalist then
| reference the entry there. I don't mind if it's duplicated, I
| just want to be able to improve the location data without
| sharing the improved location data so publicly.
| Matumio wrote:
| I don't know if it will work, but Pl@ntNet Identify (which I
| use often) seems to have an API:
| https://docs.plantnet.org/en/reference/api-plantnet/
| frontierkodiak wrote:
| Hey, good news! Pollination ecologist + ML guy here; with open
| models coming soon.
|
| You can keep an eye on (gh) polli-labs/linnaeus (a bit stale;
| I'll rebase on my private repo later tonight-). There's some
| cool ideas in here to exploit the structure of taxonomic
| hierarchies to help the model approach recognition how a
| professional taxonomist might.. so working from coarse to fine,
| taxonomy-guided label smoothing (distributing alpha mass by
| taxonomic distance)..and (forthcoming) RL on expert consensus
| to teach abstention (if an expert could only identify a
| specimen to genus for some set of inputs; then our model should
| abstain from a species classification for the same inputs).
| Unfortunately I am very, very compute-constrained- but shooting
| for late April/first week of May for insect + flowering plant
| models. (Other taxa will come later; probably as unified
| model). I'm working on camera-based (automated) ecological
| monitoring systems for ~6yrs at this point; it's a really fun
| problem space! dropped out of grad school to go all-in on
| automating my favorite job I ever had (pollination ecology
| field research..watching flowers for visitations!); since I
| knew I'd always be a mediocre ecologist- but an engineer that
| happens to care about ecology could be very very valuable to my
| field.
|
| a taxa recognition model turns out to be only a small piece of
| the system you need to extract structured observational data
| from cameras in the field :-) Working with one of my partners
| right now to launch a really cool demo of what's possible these
| days- Texas folks especially; keep an eye out on wildflower.org
| around May 1!
|
| I'll spill more ink soon but (anyone) please get in touch if
| you find these things interesting. Or if you'd like to help me
| out with compute/expenses!
| Beestie wrote:
| This site was helpful in documenting the spread of lantern flies
| (invasive critters that damage trees on the U.S. East Coast) -
| the more folks that report sightings (of anything not just
| problem critters) the better for all concerned.
|
| Conversely, its also beneficial to report sightings of helpful
| bugs/birds/bats/etc. so can get an early warning when a
| population starts to thin out.
| ray__ wrote:
| I love this app, but it's also a significant doxxing risk
| especially for the large number of non-technical users that it
| has. A quick look at the map reveals the home addresses and names
| of many iNaturalist users in my neighborhood, lots of them older
| folks that probably don't realize that adding all of the neat
| wildlife that they see in their backyard (or uploading things
| they see on remote hikes without any 3G coverage once their phone
| connects to their home wifi network) is also putting their home
| address on display by adding a cluster of photos right next to
| their house that are all attached to their account.
| lithocarpus wrote:
| Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user
| is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of
| this, the default should be low precision location data with a
| random offset per item + random offset per user.
| jayknight wrote:
| It has options to hide or obscure the location, which I use
| whenever I'm anywhere near my house, but it should be a
| little better about prompting users to use that.
| rwoll wrote:
| Strava (a running tracking app) provides two helpful
| controls you can set as your default:
|
| 1. "Hide the start and end points of activities that start
| at SPECIFIC addresses." 2. "Hide start and end no matter
| where they happen."
|
| Then it can be useful to add your home/work/routine
| locations.
|
| If iNaturalist doesn't have a setting like that, it's a
| nice approach -- especially if it's included as part of
| initial onboarding flow -- so it helps people without
| needing to remember to make visibility choices each time.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Does this matter if my account is some random username about
| birds?
|
| Like all people learn is "someone does in fact live at that
| address and they use this app"
| ray__ wrote:
| Maybe not, but I'd want to know beforehand either way. And
| looking through accounts near me suggests that a fair number
| of users add enough detail to make me think that they don't
| realize that their info is so public (selfies/profile
| pictures being the most problematic example imo).
| jszymborski wrote:
| Yah, this is what I do, however I think this is what GP is
| talking about when they say savvy (or maybe I'm flattering
| myself). Plenty of folks with their full details on their
| profile.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Home ownership is in the public record tho, right?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| There's an option to obscure the exact location of plants, but
| it's not obvious.
| getpost wrote:
| I can hide my home-based observation locations, but others
| usually do not. People who post observations in my front yard
| cause other iNat users to visit. This hasn't been a problem in
| that there have been only a few additional visitors, and they
| are friendly. Still, I don't like my yard being publicized.
|
| People who walk by the yard might tell their friends, but
| ordinary word-of-mouth can't be queried online. Not yet.
|
| EDIT: We did have what turned out to be a significant invasive
| species observation. It was published in my SO's account with
| the location obscured. I looked up the species online and
| realized it might be a concern, so I killed it and put it in
| the freezer. In the meantime, the California Agricultural
| Inspectors got wind of it and contacted iNat to obtain the
| email address associated with the account. After making
| contact, they sent someone to pick up my specimen, and the
| later, 4 inspectors (yes, really, 3 inspectors and a
| supervisor) were sent to look for additional specimens. None
| were found.
|
| Unrelated to this incident, I posted endangered species (not on
| our property) in my account, and iNat automatically obscures
| the location. Later on, I got an ~~email~~ message via iNat
| from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife asking for
| access to the precise locations, which I gladly provided.
| ray__ wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know that iNaturalist was so proactive about
| that sort of thing. It also sounds like you have a really
| cool yard! :)
| getpost wrote:
| I didn't mean to suggest that iNat is proactive, they may
| well be.
|
| IIRC, the exact chain of events was: Invasive Species
| Observation posted -> a curator at the LA Natural History
| saw the post and notified the CDFA (Agriculture Inspectors)
| -> CDFA contacts iNat to get email address -> CDFA contacts
| my SO. I don't recall whether iNat had a built-in messaging
| service at the time (they do now).
|
| Regarding endangered species, the California Department of
| Fish and Wildlife evidently joined iNaturalist, in part to
| enhance their data collection. They seem to be monitoring
| iNaturalist and contacting users who have relevant
| observations. They seem very sensitive to privacy concerns,
| and cooperation is voluntary. I'm thrilled a state agency
| is engaging the public in protecting our natural resources.
|
| These state employees have indeed been proactive.
| jakeydus wrote:
| What was the invasive species??
| getpost wrote:
| That would be doxxing, not that it matters here.
| kiddico wrote:
| I have my house covered in observations and it would not take a
| rocket scientist to figure out where I live. I'm also a big
| believer in accurately tagging observations with locations of
| things in case someone else wants to try to find it. If someone
| wants to come to my house and take pictures of spring tails
| they're welcome to lol
| whyenot wrote:
| I feel like this ship has already sailed. The home addresses of
| most people, especially if they have lived in the same place
| for awhile, is already online. In my case, even my salary info
| is online because I am a public employee.
| deckar01 wrote:
| Wait until you see what happens when you type your address into
| google earth.
|
| https://youtu.be/xicsyakpIL4
| wglass wrote:
| Hah. I grew up when everyone had their names in the phone book
| with phone number and home address. It matters more to some
| people than others.
| jpmattia wrote:
| In fact, you had to pay extra to have your number/address
| omitted from the phone book.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| This is like pro spider league.
| preuceian wrote:
| I've been using Observation.org (or rather its localized version
| Waarneming.nl) to record my hedgehog sightings. Should I use both
| platforms, or do these data points end up aggregated downstream
| anyway?
| jw_cook wrote:
| Both iNaturalist and Observation.org publish observation data
| to GBIF:
|
| https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...
|
| https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f6...
| coalteddy wrote:
| Does anyone know how they make their map so performant? Showing
| all those pins is mind blowing to me coming from leaflet maps.
| Marinetraffic is also a map that blows me away every time i see
| all the icons and how smooth and fast the loading is when zooming
| in. Would love to make a similar map at some point for my hobby
| but leaflet just does not cut it when you want to render
| 10million plus pins on a global map.
|
| Tech blogs or pointers would be great
| noahgolmant wrote:
| You may want to look into the PMTiles format and tippecanoe. It
| efficiently produces pyramidal XYZ tile overviews of vector
| data. Sometimes this is also done server side via the PostGIS
| asMVT ffunction, or Martin.
|
| For client side rendering, deck.gl is quite good, also a newer
| library called lonboard from DevelopmentSeed.
| jw_cook wrote:
| Points are rendered server-side, backed by Elasticsearch, and
| served as PNG tiles for each zoom level. Individual markers are
| only rendered for small sets. Some of the relevant source code:
|
| https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...
|
| https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...
|
| https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Also: WhoBird. A decent bird ID app that has the merit of being
| FOSS and available on F-Droid.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| is there any FOSS app for plants?
| butlike wrote:
| Ok the little infographic that shows "how it works" looks like
| the cloudflare warning when cloudflare can't connect to the host.
| gardnr wrote:
| A genuinely good-for-the-world project. The data is really useful
| for science and for machine learning. You can export all the
| research-grade identifications of fungi to train a classifier; if
| that's what you're into.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I wish there was some kind of desktop application that I could
| sit down and locally organize my data into, allowing me to keep a
| full quality source while syncing a copy to naturalist for others
| to benefit from.
|
| As it stands, I don't really have a system in place, and I don't
| want to put a lot of effort into a lossy (assets get compressed
| and stripped of metadata) online project.
| jw_cook wrote:
| iNaturalist would agree with you; they explicitly say[1] it's
| not meant to be the primary source for your photos. Users
| generally fall into a couple broad camps:
|
| 1. Mostly use the mobile app, and take photos and upload
| observations directly from there. Local photo collection either
| isn't a priority or is backed up by their phone's cloud sync.
|
| 2. Mostly use inaturalist.org via a desktop browser, with
| either a standalone digital camera or mobile photos synced to
| desktop. Local filesystem (hopefully plus backups) is the
| source of truth.
|
| I have been working on a desktop application[2] with a long-
| term goal of full bidirectional sync, and a secondary goal of
| offline usage. The current feature set is fairly modest and
| read-only, though, focusing on organizing local photos using
| data from iNat.
|
| [1] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about
|
| [2] https://github.com/pyinat/naturtag
| djeastm wrote:
| Not to be confused with iNaturist...
| bsimpson wrote:
| I expected fewer butterflies and more asses.
| jmusall wrote:
| Haven't tried iNaturalist yet, but I love Merlin Bird ID [1] and
| Flora Incognita [2]. The latter seems to be exceptionally
| accurate (over 80% up to 98% depending on the dataset) [3]. They
| also expose an API for "registered external clients" [4], but so
| far I sadly wasn't able to find any further documentation on it.
|
| A problem I often have with Merlin is that the birds seem to know
| when I record them, and promptly stop singing...
|
| [1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
|
| [2] https://floraincongita.com/
|
| [3] https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10676
|
| [4] https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13611
| tagami wrote:
| I have a friend that works there. They recently posted a few open
| positions:
|
| User Insights and Analytics Manager
| https://app.beapplied.com/apply/kwwnthztts
|
| Technical Delivery Manager
| https://app.beapplied.com/apply/ppeyvinuw4
| anotheryou wrote:
| how does it compare to obsidentify? (same doxxing problem there)
|
| does it allow to save observations without publishing? want a
| pokedeck
| Evidlo wrote:
| > it has open CORS headers which means it's amazing for demos and
| tutorials.
|
| The fact that this even exists is so sad. CORS is such an ill-
| conceived idea
| pvillano wrote:
| https://www.instagram.com/inaturalistshitpost/
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| is there a way to migrate findings from Seek to iNaturalist? I do
| not want to start from scratch.
|
| Also I am unclear as far as the app. Is it F/LOSS? If so, why is
| it not on other repos like F-Droid?
| ivanstepanovftw wrote:
| iNaturalist - dataset collection project
| NkWsy wrote:
| The Inat API is so great. We use it on our chicago river
| cameratrap ID site to get species info and eventually upload
| results to it. Once we filter out the millions of Chicago Geese.
| https://rangers.urbanrivers.org/cameratrap.
|
| Plus having a project is cool to see other observations in a
| given ecological area https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wild-
| mile-chicago
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-03 23:00 UTC)