Three Hundred Million Acts of Attention: Why We Support iNaturalist

Someone kneels on a sidewalk to photograph a beetle they have never seen before. They upload the picture from their phone, and within a few hours a retired entomologist in another hemisphere and two amateur naturalists two towns over have agreed on what it is. That agreement turns the photo into a research grade record, and the record joins a global database that scientists can actually use.

That is the whole idea. It sounds almost too simple to matter, and yet this spring iNaturalist passed three hundred million observations.

What a Community Built

iNaturalist began in 2008 as a graduate project at Berkeley. It was incubated for years by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, and in 2023 it became an independent nonprofit standing on its own. This spring it celebrated its eighteenth birthday alongside that three hundred millionth observation and more than seven thousand scientific publications that have drawn on the data its community collected.

Think about what that number represents. Not three hundred million dollars, or three hundred million clicks. Three hundred million moments when a person stopped, looked closely at a living thing, and decided it was worth recording.

Data With the Doors Wide Open

What makes iNaturalist unusual among biodiversity projects is that nothing is hoarded. Every observation is open and freely available to researchers, conservation practitioners, land managers, and anyone else who is curious. The identification process is communal rather than credentialed, which means a high school student in Iowa and a museum taxonomist carry the same weight when they are right.

The platform has become working infrastructure in the plainest sense. Range shifts get noticed. Invasive species get flagged early. Die off events get documented while they are still happening. None of this was designed in advance by an institution. It emerged because enough people were paying attention in enough places at once.

The City Nature Challenge, now in its eleventh year, shows the scale of it. What started as a friendly rivalry between Los Angeles and San Francisco has become the largest annual biodiversity census in the world, with participants across hundreds of cities documenting what lives in their own neighborhoods over a single long weekend.

Where It Meets Our Pillars

Our environmental science and education pillars are usually described separately. iNaturalist is one of the few places where they are genuinely the same activity. A child learning to identify a milkweed is also generating a data point about pollinator habitat. A weekend birder is also contributing to the scientific record. Curiosity and evidence turn out to be the same muscle.

We support iNaturalist because it proves something worth proving. Ordinary attention, gathered at scale and shared without restriction, is a real scientific instrument. The credit for that belongs to the community that built it, observation by observation, and to the many people and organizations who have sustained it over eighteen years. We are glad to be one of them, and we would encourage anyone reading this to go outside and add one more observation to the pile.