iNaturalist helps you identify the plants and animals around you while generating data for science and conservation. Get connected with a community of millions scientists and naturalists who can help you learn more about nature! What’s more, by recording and sharing your observations, you’ll create research-quality data for scientists working to better understand and protect nature. So if you like recording your findings from the outdoors, or if you just like learning about life, join us!

iNaturalist is a 501c3 nonprofit organization based in the USA (Tax ID 92-1296468).

Vision: iNaturalist's vision is a world where everyone can understand and sustain biodiversity through the practice of observing wild organisms and sharing information about them.

Mission: iNaturalist’s mission is to connect people to nature and advance biodiversity science and conservation through technology.

What is iNaturalist?

iNaturalist is a lot of different things, but at its core,

iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature

It's also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool. You can use it to record your own observations, get help with identifications, collaborate with others to collect this kind of information for a common purpose, or access the observational data collected by iNaturalist users.

What it isn't

Here are some things iNaturalist is not:

It's NOT a repository for external data Our approach towards advancing biodiversity science and conservation is to focus on supporting a large healthy community using the platform to generate, share, explore and curate data rather than focusing on accruing data. As such, iNat is not a data repository and isn’t a good place to drop off external data not generated on the platform. Please check out GBIF as an appropriate repository.

It's NOT a way to back up your photos We resize and reprocess all the photos directly uploaded to iNat. And while we do archive photos from 3rd party services like Flickr, do not rely on us to keep the original information in photos you add to iNat. Maintain good backups on your own hardware, or use one of the many cloud-based backup solutions out there.

It's NOT a tool for mapping everything It's not even here to map all ecological phenomena, like rocks, trash, water features, etc. iNaturalist is for recording observations of individual living things, particularly things that can be tied to a species name. It's certainly not here to map your friends, security camera, recycling bins, etc. If you're interested in those kinds of things, try a photo-sharing site (many of them include maps), Open Data Kit, or another mapping platform.

It's NOT a way to collect secret information iNat is fundamentally about sharing information. If law, local policy, personal preference, or the particularities of your project require that you keep information hidden from public view, posting to iNaturalist may not meet your needs. We do perform some limited obscuration of coordinates for sensitive species or by your choice on individual observations. For personal privacy concerns, we recommend Seek by iNaturalist which by default only stores observations on your device.

History of iNaturalist

Ken-ichi Ueda originally conceived of the idea for iNaturalist in 2005, and it was launched as the Master's final project of Ken-ichi, Nate Agrin, and Jessica Kline at UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2008. Nate and Ken-ichi continued working on the site after graduation. In 2010, Ken-ichi began collaborating with Scott Loarie. In 2011, Scott and Ken-ichi organized as iNaturalist, LLC. They began growing the community and expanding the platform, including launching the first mobile app. In 2014, iNaturalist became an initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and a joint initiative with National Geographic Society in 2017. In 2023, iNaturalist became an independent nonprofit organization. Ken-ichi served as Co-director until 2023 and as a Software Engineer from 2023 to 2025. What began as a student project grew into one of the world’s largest biodiversity platforms, connecting millions of people to their local nature while contributing critical data to science and conservation.