Many of us use the excellent AI engine at iNaturalist to identify that interesting species found along the trail. But did you know that every observation you upload goes into a global data base that is used by thousands of investigators and provides a remarkable benchmark of both the current and evolving state of our fragile environment.

Here are some statistics, iNaturalist has:

• Created over 146,000,000 verifiable observations (adding about 1 million per week!)
• Grown to 2.7 million contributors
• Observed more than 430,000 species
• Been cited more than 3,500 times via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility
• Become a partner of our own Atlas of Living Australia.

Originally conceived from a as a master’s project at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 and nurtured by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society iNaturalist has recently become an independent non-profit organisation.

I use iNaturalist almost daily and it has become my go to spot for those strange plants, fungi, animals… that I find as I wander. It formed the basis for our local citizen-science kangaroo project ‘Count Your Mob‘, and you can access a list of all species recorded in MP Shire here. They even provide an archive of the observations at a specific address or by a single observer – a subset of mine is here.

It is a valuable resource, and I, for one, wish them well.

– Greg Holland