Become an iNaturalist contributor

What iNaturalist is

iNaturalist is the world’s largest open citizen-science platform for biodiversity observation. It is operated jointly by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. Anyone in the world can sign up. Anyone can submit a photograph of a wild plant or animal with a date and location. Other users (and an in-house computer-vision model) suggest species identifications. When two independent users agree on the species, the observation is marked “research grade” and exported to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), where it becomes part of the open primary biodiversity dataset that ecologists everywhere use^[1][4].

This is not a toy. As of 2026 there are over 230 million observations on iNaturalist, contributed by over 4 million users, covering more than 500,000 species. Recent peer-reviewed papers in conservation, phenology, climate-range-shift research, and population dynamics routinely cite iNaturalist research-grade observations as primary data.

Step 1 — Sign up

Go to inaturalist.org and create a free account. Pick a username; you can keep your real name private if you prefer. Install the iNaturalist app on your phone (iOS or Android — not Seek; you want the full app) for in-the-field uploads^[2].

Read the getting-started page; it is short and answers most first-day questions^[2].

Step 2 — Pick your patch

Choose a single forested area you can revisit easily — a local park, a nature reserve, a creek line, a wood at the edge of town. Smaller is better; you will spend more time looking and find more things. Half a hectare is plenty for the first ten observations.

Step 3 — Find ten species

Walk slowly. Stop often. Photograph anything you can name (or that interests you, even if you cannot name it). Aim for ten distinct species across multiple groups: trees, shrubs, ferns, mosses, fungi, lichens, insects, spiders, birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles. The mix matters more than the count.

For each observation, take three photos:

1. Whole organism. The plant in its setting, the bird at the right zoom, the mushroom at ground level.
2. Identifying detail. A leaf, a flower, a wing pattern, the underside of a fern frond, the stem of a mushroom.
3. Scale and context. Your hand for size reference if appropriate; the substrate it was on (bark, soil, a host plant).

Multiple photos help the community ID. Single blurry photos often get marked “needs ID” and never reach research-grade.

Step 4 — Upload

Open the iNaturalist app. Tap “Observe.” Add the photos. The app uses GPS to autofill the location and the time to autofill the date. The computer-vision model suggests an identification immediately.

Crucially: do not blindly accept the model’s suggestion. If you do not know the species, leave it at the genus or family level the model is most confident about. Other users will refine your ID. Submitting confidently-but-wrongly is worse than submitting at “Plantae” or “Lepidoptera” and letting the community refine it.

Step 5 — Wait for confirmation

Within hours to days, other users will see your observation, agree or disagree with the species, and refine the identification. Once two users agree on the species (or the appropriate finer rank), the observation flips to research-grade and gets exported to GBIF. Your phone will notify you.

Step 6 — Identify someone else’s observation

The reciprocal favour: pick a species you know well — even just one or two — and spend ten minutes on the iNaturalist “Identify” page suggesting IDs for other people’s observations of that species. The community is built on this. Most early users get their first ten observations confirmed because someone they don’t know spent ten minutes confirming them.

Step 7 — Use Seek alongside

The companion app Seek by iNaturalist runs on your phone, requires no account, and uses on-device computer vision to identify species in real time^[3]. It is faster than full iNaturalist for in-field guesses and useful for kids who are not yet old enough to maintain a long-term iNaturalist account. Seek observations don’t become part of the open record — for that, use the full iNaturalist app.

Verifying species identifications

Once you have an iNaturalist identification, you can verify it against authoritative botanical or zoological references:

• Plants of the World Online (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) for any plant species globally^[5].
• Encyclopedia of Life for cross-kingdom species pages^[6].

Both are free and open-access.

Why this is real work

Most ecological research depends on open biodiversity data. Most of that data is volunteer-collected. iNaturalist is the largest single channel into that pipeline. Your ten research-grade observations sit alongside professional records and join the same downstream uses — range-shift studies, climate-effect papers, conservation status assessments, regional flora updates.

Once you have ten observations, the obvious next step is fifty. Once you have fifty, you have started learning what species are actually around you, in the place you live, and you can’t walk through that place again without seeing more.