INaturalist

iNaturalist (or iNat) is a app and a web community, created by Nate Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda in 2008"About" (2019-06-26). iNaturalist.org. Retrieved 20 July 2019., that aims to create a crowdsourced, worldwide database of living things, with the goal of connecting people to nature through technology"What Is It" (2019-05-05). iNaturalist.org. Retrieved on July 20, 2019.. It is currently run as a joint venture by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, and works with other national and international scientific entities worldwide"Partners" (2019-01-24). iNaturalist.org. Retrieved 20 July 2019.. The site software is open source.
== How iNaturalist Works ==
iNaturalist is similar to the Maryland Biodiversity Project: its database has been created by enthusiasts around the world taking photos of living things and a mix of hobbyists and professional scientists volunteering their time identifying the species in those photos. However, iNaturalist is different in that it is somewhat older and its ambitions are global in scale. As a result, they have far more resources, including a full-time paid staff and the ability to use cutting edge technology like computer vision (trained on their massive dataset) to assist with identification"Help" (2019-07-15). iNaturalist.org. Retrieved July 20, 2019..
=== Species Records ===
A typical iNaturalist record contains various visualizations of the data from the accumulated observations, including a map, a chart of when in the year it is most often observed in various states, and so on. iNaturalist integrates with Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia of Life to provide additional details on each species. It also uses its users mistakes, allowing it to populate a list of common misidentifications for every species.
=== Photography ===
One exciting feature is that most uploaded to iNaturalist are released under a Creative Commons license; individuals may choose to copyright their images, but since Creative Commons is an opt-out default rather than opt-in, most choose not to. This means that most iNaturalist images can be used for our wiki - just confirm the license on each individual photo and follow the license terms.
=== Export Tools ===
iNaturalist allows any logged-in user to generate an export from their database. This allows you to get a list of taxa observed in a particular location, a list of locations where a specific taxon was observed, and so on. It's an extremely powerful tool, and was used in the construction of this wiki to identify where species have been sighted and to find Creative Commons licensed photos of species.
=== Checklists ===
iNaturalist also has checklists for various locales, including a Maryland Checklist and a United States Checklist, each of which can be filtered down to show only plants. iNaturalist uses these lists to flag species as either native or introduced, though it is not clearly stated what the source of the data is. Checklists can be exported to CSV.
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