iNaturalist 4+

Connect with Nature

iNaturalist

Designed for iPad

    • Free

Screenshots

Description

iNaturalist is a social network for sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. The primary goal is to connect people to nature, and the secondary goal is to generate scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters.

iNaturalist helps you identify plants and animals with visually similar suggestions and verification by dedicated contributors. Get connected with a community of over a million scientists and naturalists who can help you learn more about nature! By recording and sharing your observations, you'll create research-quality data for scientists working to better understand and protect nature.

KEY FEATURES
• Identification suggestions: Take or import a photo and view the top 10 most visually similar species matches and tap through to get more information. You can view these suggestions even before creating an account.
• Feedback from our community: Create an account to share your observations and start a conversation about what you saw. Can’t identify the organism? Start with a broad identification like “plants” or “fungi” so others with more expertise can find it and refine the identification.
• Keep a record of all living things: Build your life list by posting to iNaturalist. Where, when, and what you saw is the basis of each observation you create.
• Grounded in science: Every identification is connected to the tree of life, which means you can search for broad classifications like “Ferns” or “Fungi” as well as species-level identifications like “Humpback Whale” (and everything in between).
• Advancing science & conservation: Millions of observations created and identified by the iNaturalist community are shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility where they are used to advance scientific understanding of biodiversity through open data and open science.
• Enabling citizen science and community science: Join any of the tens of thousands of projects around the world on iNaturalist to draw attention to and collect data about particular species or places.
• Not-for-profit: iNaturalist is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States. iNaturalist is free for anyone to use thanks to the generous support of many organizations and individuals. Thank you!
• No hidden charges: This app is truly free because we believe nature is for everyone.
• Best for wild plants and animals: The iNaturalist community is better at identifying wild plants and animals than those in gardens or horticulture. Get outside and find what’s wild!
• Control how your location is shared: Set the privacy to obscured (only general location is shared) or private (no location is shared at all, but much harder for others to help identify). The locations of species at risk from disturbance are automatically obscured.
• More than a mobile app: iNaturalist has even more extensive features and tools for learning and exploration. Get the full experience at inaturalist.org!
• 35+ languages: iNaturalist has been translated into dozens of languages thanks to multilingual enthusiasts who want to see the community grow.
• A global network: iNaturalist is used in every country on earth! In many countries, we have formal agreements with local organizations to promote iNaturalist. Use this app for contributing to all iNaturalist Network sites, including Naturalista (Mexico and Colombia), iNaturalist.NZ (New Zealand), iNaturalist.ca (Canada), Biodiversity4All (Portugal), iNaturalistAU (Australia), iNaturalistPa (Panama), iNaturalistEc (Ecuador), ArgentiNat (Argentina), iNaturalistil (Israel), and iNaturalistFi (Suomi/Finland).

What’s New

Version 3.3.5

bugfixes and performance enhancements

Ratings and Reviews

4.6 out of 5
4.3K Ratings

4.3K Ratings

Luke van der Colff ,

An amazing app all around for identifying species.

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!!!

Adam Nicke ,

Love the app maybe make it more like a social network of naturalists?

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.

yetanothermillenial ,

It’s amazing and it could be more amazing

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.

App Privacy

The developer, iNaturalist, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

  • Location
  • Contact Info
  • User Content
  • Identifiers

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

  • Usage Data
  • Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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