iNaturalist is a social network of people helping each other learn about nature | Hacker News Reader

iNaturalist is a social network of people helping each other learn about nature

wired.com

245 pointsSirLJ56 comments

iNaturalist was the final product of my Master's degree thesis team. I haven't contributed to it since school, about 11 years, so I don't deserve any credit for its success. The folks who have kept it alive are personal heros - they sacrificed a lot and invested so much to build the community that exists today. It's probably the project I'm still the proudest to have contributed to.

When we started, our goal was to encourage people to go outside and engage with the world around them. We dreamt that the data gathered by the community would be used in scientific research, but weren't confident it would ever reach enough of a critical mass. It has! More surprisingly, we had no idea how important iNat's image dataset would become for computer vision research.

Again, so proud of the folks who have helped to make iNaturalist thrive and so glad it still exists in the world.

Evidence that doing something great doesn’t need to be through startup-capital-based systems. One can build and study something that can be of great importance to humanity without its core values being tainted by money.

"iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society."

It makes me pretty happy that this is not a VC-backed startup.

When someone recommended it to me last summer, I was hesitant to be yet another content creator for yet another platform. Then I saw it was run by science foundations! Signed up immediately. It’s been fun in Colorado to learn plants that I see on hikes.

The data is uploaded to gbif[0]. Where you can download it for free!

0. https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...

Thanks for sharing this, I've been yearning for an app like this for months maybe even years.

More impressive even is that iNaturalist is seemingly entirely open source: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers

The backend is Rails (4.2), the iNaturalist iOS app is native, the Seek app is ReactNative. It's really neat stuff.

Their 2019 Year in Review post is fascinating and impressive as well: https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/29540-year-in-review-2019

Today marks the last day I'll be the (paid) maintainer for a similar project called Fieldscope.

Fieldscope is a similar project that came out of NatGeo. It is currently operated by BSCS.

Fieldscope is now very old and is being rebuilt with modern tech. I did not write the app itself, but kept it alive for 2 years.

Working on it opened up my eyes to all the wonderful world of citizen science. Specially how many (really many) scientific datasets are available for open use.

One of the datasets I enjoyed working with is one that centers around the Chesapeake Bay project. It contains flora observations taken by citizen volunteers. It's very interesting to learn about the history of the Chesapeake Bay and to be able to map how it has changed over time.

I exhort those intersted in open source and science to look into tackling problems in this space. Observing and recording nature is not a solved problem. Better software will certainly help get there. I'm on the process of doing so myself. Makes no sense to waste all this experience without benefit open source and science.

If you are part of a scientific project please reach out to me. Email in profile.

I'm a developer with a masters degree in biology. I would love to contribute to iNaturalist but Rails seems cumbersome from my POV, but in the end I think I'll try.

Any other open source projects looking for help?

I would rephrase your approach based on what technologies you know and want to work with.

Instead of looking for project who need help, why not:

I know $technology, which projects are looking for help?

It's then a matter of a couple of web searching sessions. :)

BTE, almost all scientific projects are looking for help. It's a matter of fit.

You're right, I'm just hyped for things like iNaturalist because handling citizen science data was part of my job when I worked as a biologist and put my two fielda of interest together sounds great.

My main stack now are C# and JS (Vue). Well, better start searching.

I do know for a fact that front end work is a big need. Solid FE work that takes a11y seriously will provide endless opportunities.

Best of luck!

More than 2000 observations in my Brazilian hometown[1]. Not bad!

Kinda feels like a real-life Pokemon — without the capturing and slaving part.

I haven't seen any monkeys and we have quite a few. I'll try adding some!

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=20640

I can't recommend iNaturalist enough. You can learn about the world around you by uploading sightings of any plants and animals you see all while contributing to a rich dataset for scientific research. I regularly upload birds and occasionally other fauna from where I live and work.

I'm a huge fan of Seek. It's not perfect, sometimes it can be tricky to get just the right combination of zoom + lighting + angles to get a good match, but I've been impressed at what a good job it does. It's great to take on local hikes with kids.

Note: I tried reading the article:

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Speaking of learning about nature, Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't YT channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3CBOpT2-NRvoc2ecFMDCsA

It sounds like this app will be different and useful, which is good.

that youtube channel is really great!

Yes, he is awesome, so engaging. I'm in the UK, I would really like a similar channel localised to the UK if anyone has suggestions?

No idea, also curious. If you like this kind of stuff you might be interested in https://candidegardening.com/GB/about if you haven't joined already. Should be quite uk centric.

iNat has a lot of unique content too - not just "in your backyard" type of stuff. Just a couple of days ago, a user posted a picture of what appears to be a new species of Spiny Orbweaver spiders:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39210068

Gastheracantha cancriformis is not a rare species

Or G. sauteri, that looks more probable.

I'm not sure if you're implying this is not a new species (which would be possible, of course) - but it does not look like either of those you mentioned. Not to appeal to authority, but the two members who initially called out the uniqueness of that spider have collectively identified thousands of Gastheracantha observations specifically, and never previously claimed that any of those were new species so far as I'm aware.

We'll never know, and this is exactly the problem with this kind of web pages. This is pseudotaxonomy.

Uses Rails and Node.js! It's nice to see an example of a great project that uses Boring Software™ in 2020.

That's a funny way of stating it's a great example of 2(?) people coding a sustainable service to hundreds of thousands of others.

The nature of HN creates an illusion that everyone is(or should be) using the cutting edge tool, framework, or paradigm du jour. Rails and Node.js are fairly old in tech years at this point, especially the former, yet iNaturalist is a demonstration that they are both very capable and worth using in 2020. I don't know how I got misinterpreted. There have been multiple articles posted here in the past referring to such things as "Boring Software". My comment was intended as a compliment in every way.

For plants only I also use Picture This app.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picturethis-plant-identifier/i...

The one I love is Plantsnap: https://www.plantsnap.com/

I submitted my first observation one month ago. Love this stuff, especially given that I collected more than 1000 observations of trees during my masters; I'm now slowly publishing the interesting ones.

I love iNaturalist, I get to learn more about the local plants and animals, and contribute to scientific projects at the same time. Their AI works remarkably well at identification most of the time.

Can you say more about the AI identification? I use iNat frequently and have never seen it suggest or recommend an ID from my photos.

Did you click / tap in the suggest ID box (web / mobile app) and then wait? Suggestions usually pop-up.

See these iNat Video Tutorials for examples [1]

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/video+tutorials

Oh I see there is a completely different interface when uploading photos directly vs importing from Flickr. Since I import all photos from my Flickr to maintain the metadata link it must be using an older less flashy form.

Didn't even know the one in the video existed until now.

Yes, I usually upload my images directly into iNaturalist, so it usually suggests an ID for me when I put an ID on each observation.

I found an iNat page on uploading observations from Flickr [1] which is probably what you used. It seems to say you can add an ID for each upload but it doesn't say if the AI will help you with the ID, like with the direct uploading to iNat.

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/flickr_upload

Reminds me my old pet project. I created android apps[1] for local herpetologist in Indonesia using iNaturalist API. So, people can report every encounter of herpetofauna around them and saved as gallery for their portfolio.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=id.web.adiyatm...

Related from a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21870138

A bit from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831794

My grandmother was a member of the local "Naturalist's Field Club" a bunch of mostly little old ladies who would go on bus trips to look at flowers in the countryside - they were continually being confused with the Naturists which resulted in a bunch of embarrassed tittering

I wish something like this existed for organisms you see under the microscope (fungi, bacteria, viruses).

I don't see any limitations... try uploading!

There are lots of limitations in fact with the idea of identifying a bacteria or a microbe with a microscope.

Sure, same with images of anything though. There's always metadata. Some categories have extra properties, so you could handle this by documenting the stain in use, magnification, density count, spatial affinity, sample type, etc.

I do something similar just for fun, since many years. In my experience lots of just will not care about taking the steps necessary or provide the extra info, they just want easy answers from the blurriest phone photo available. Taxonomy is not simple. Not even for trained people.

Doing this with bacteria and virus opens the door to a world of legal problems and medicine trouble. I would advice against.

True, you could disable the ML identification bit. But the value of a browseable taxonomy with social identification features remains.

-> lots of [users] just will not

iNaturalist is primarily for wild organisms, but it doesn't matter if they're macroscopic or not.

There are some iNaturalist projects specializing in microbes (more than just these two). A project isn't necessary to submit observations, but it can help bring it to the attention of others able to verify your identification.

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/microscopic-microbes

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/cyanoscope

One issue that I've noticed with their system is that usually when a person posts an image, they take a random guess at the ID, and then all their friends will dog-pile on agreeing with it. There are so many misidentifications on there and not enough experts to correct it.

Could it be remedied by getting more experts to join? In cases like that, the hivemind is stronger than accreditations. It might just be a good idea to have some kind of moderation that can overrule people. Although that also adds the risk of alienating people who're very adamant about their identifications.

I believe some of the 'random' guesses is actually the background AI system suggesting an identification.

Depending on the organism, it mostly works until it doesn't. :-) For example, in my region (Singapore), it's suggestions for mammals, birds and butterflies is mostly correct at Genus, Order or Family level.

I do agree that some identifications could be better and try to help by putting comments when I see something wrong (e.g., "this species is not native to the region"). But even putting in the wrong ID is better than not putting an ID and leaving a sighting as "Unknown". There is a huge pile of unknown identifications that nobody looks at because the experts usually filter by the organisms they know about.

Here is an old (2016) article about the AI recognition system being used by iNaturalist [1].

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/computer_vision_demo

I really like their Seek app when finding myself in the woods or in a botanical garden.

Is this the new definition of social network these days? Back in the 80s or 90s these would have been affinity groups, forums, or even just a BBS if it was dialup centric.

I love it! I can identify a number of native plants, but I use it for hikes when I spot something that looks weird. I found native orchids at my work!

Sweet, something useful and educational. The interface reminds me a lot of the now defunct foodspotting.

I have used this and love it!

iNaturalist is a ton of fun!

Given "naturalist" is sometimes a moniker for a nudist, it's hard not to wonder about precisely what these people are helping each other learn.

Edit: Doh! I was indeed thinking of "naturist". (Also, glad I don't care about the downvotes; intended mild joke, clearly whiffed on that too.)

Never heard of that moniker, I heard "naturist" though. Might that be what you meant?

I think that a "naturist" is a nudist - a "naturalist" (as used here) is someone interested in nature.

Obviously, it's possible to be both!

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