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.
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.
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.
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.
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???
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.
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.
Love the owl website. Feedback/suggestion: when I clicked on use my location, it should show me all matches in a given radius of that location instead of waiting for me to fill something in the search box. The browser asked for permission and I allowed to share my location.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
"Unless you specify otherwise when you post Content, you agree to license Content you contribute to the Platform under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC)." [0]
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.
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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%... )
Fun to travel and "pokemon" some new local stuff 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.
>Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away.
Frustration shared.
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???
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
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!
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
[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
Great app, easy interface, friendly community. Thank you iNaturalist team!
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.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-07-10/inaturalist-d...
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/05/09/the-c...
Tech blogs or pointers would be great
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Plus having a project is cool to see other observations in a given ecological area https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wild-mile-chicago
[0] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/terms
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.