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Citizen science for 21st-century naturalists
Founded in 2008 as part of a graduate project at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information, the iNaturalist app serves a global community for nature observation and identification. The iNaturalist environment connects people and nature through technology. Combined with a smartphone and iNaturalist, the natural world becomes a living learning lab for student exploration, observation, and discovery (see Figure 1). With iNaturalist, participants take pictures of naturally occurring organisms (such as insects, plants, and more), and upload the images to iNautralist, where a global community of naturalists crowdsource to help identify the organism. Since 2014, iNaturalist has been associated with the California Academy of Sciences, and recent advances in the iNaturalist platform include using artificial intelligence technology to help identify plant and animal images down to the species level. By sharing your...