Things anybody can do:

Hi everyone, are we getting a new Android app version of Inaturalist any time soon?

Hello! I’m an IOS user and I used to really enjoy clicking on most favorited (or was it most ID’d? I’m not really sure) to see fun or beautiful photos from my country and species that I enjoy
But this feature disappeared on IOS? Any idea on what happened?
Thank you!

I have been noticing a lot of really egregiously bad identification by seek recently. An example I saw today was an oak leaf identified as a vermillion seastar. This seems to be getting more and more frequent. Has the app gotten worse, are recently there more seek users relative to regular iNat users, or are seek users getting less discerning?

I'm curious about your thoughts

So this map clip has some overlapping zones of pink and green, and other times I see yellow zones as well. What do these denote? In this example, the observations are for a particular mushroom, so I know it's not for migration or breeding grounds haha. I can't find this information anywhere? Thanks in advance!

Just putting feelers out to see if I'm the only one who's noticed this. I'm talking about things like clear photos of insects on a white background getting 0 insect suggestions, not 2 very similar insects getting the same suggested ID. I got a raccoon suggestion on a brown stick bug on a white wall the other day. It used to be way easy to get at least the correct FAMILY suggested, but now I feel like I'm lucky if it can tell a plant from an animal, and it feels like it's getting noticeably worse extremely quickly.

Example from today was a damselfly nymph on a white background. Some speckles of debris around, but the animal's features were clearly visible. The only insect suggestions I got were for dragonflies. No problem, I knew it was a damselfly so I just manually set it. Then I uploaded my dragonfly nymph and got NO dragonfly suggestions. I didn't even get any damselfly suggestions, so it doesn't seem to have swapped them.

It's just really weird!

I've been on holiday for the past 2 weeks and have returned with over 20,000 RAW images, almost all of which will be uploaded to iNat.

For my fellow photography and iNat enthusiasts, what is your approach when you get back from a trip with a literal mountain of photographs to go through?

My current intention is to just slowly work through them all on my lunch breaks and evenings over the next few months, but I also don't want this hobby to start feeling like a chore.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated 😅

I used to love spending my free time powering through a 6 mile trail without taking a single break. But now I'm stuck walking every trail at a snails pace, flipping every log and looking at every little thing I can find. I'm addicted and can't stop. I've unlocked the ability to spend hours outside and only walk a single mile.

Would anyone be interested in helping ID some of my observations? I'm in Florida and mostly observe wildflowers and grasses. I don't get to go out a lot so any observations I make are a big deal for me. (I'm currently partially housebound from a disability).

My profile is nunyafunya. TIA!

Hello everyone!

I found a species that is not currently available in the iNaturalist database, although it is an accepted species according to Kew’s Plants of the World Online.

I tried searching for it, including through external name providers, but couldn’t find it.

Could someone please explain how I can request that this species be added to the database so I can use the correct scientific name for my observation?

Thank you!

I just received a notification about the change from Orthetrum pruinosum clelia to Orthetrum clelia tonight. I immediately logged into my iNat account and checked my previous upload of Crimson-tailed Marsh Hawk and it states there that the scientific name Orthetrum pruinosum clelia is now an inactive taxon. Does that mean the subspecies clelia is now a separate whole new species? I'm still new in Odonata species study so I still have so much to learn, and this is an exciting news for me.

Hi! I hope someone can help me with this. We don't have a local ornithology subreddit in the Philippines so I'm hoping that there's someone here in a foreign subreddit that can answer my inquiry. Do you have a link or know any article that pertains to the natural geographical range of the Palawan Crow in the Philippines? Any research or population or DNA studies that says that Palawan Crow is really exclusively restricted to the geographic range of Palawan Province? Many of us here think that Palawan Crow (given by its name) is endemic ONLY to Palawan, but several pages and sites display its distribution range showing the island of Mindoro as its natural range too; if that were to be true, then Palawan Crow is not exclusively PALAWAN Crow afterall?

Started the app today and its quite cool but my biggest gripe isnt with the app its the fact that I live in a deforested litter filled shithole in northern england and the only things iv found are 2 snails.

So like where do i find stuff

The Bogong Moth (Agrotis infusa) is having a wonderful boom year with the number of iNat observations up from 5400 in July to over 10,000 in October! This is really fantastic news and encouraging. Congratulations to anyone who has contributed to their recovery in any way.

I think it's a porcelain mushroom, but the ID still needs to be confirmed.

with 11 729 so more than twice as many observations overall, idk if this is a typical ratio, getting ids for everything is difficult. but im still really happy with these numbers, ive been using inat since 2024 and will be using it a lot more!

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=tritonalpestre&verifiable=any

I love when people take (safe) quirky shots for their observations. This one has immediately become a favourite

I wish it made me feel better like I always want it to, but I don't know why it just makes me feel worse.

Maybe it's because most of the animals I'm finding are introduced and invasive. So many slugs and snails that damage everything and are from different continents.

I got really happy when I found a couple of snails that might've been native, but all the common invasive garden snails there are just so many of them. I know I can't bring myself to kill them because I've tried in the past and it makes me feel so sick and guilty. And I can't think of any animal to give all the snails to (because I'm okay with feeding invasives to pet invasive spiders or mantises I keep specifically to prevent them from breeding, and to have a "more useful" way of getting rid of invasive small arthropods).

Snails and slugs are so hard to find predators for, and that's probably why they're so prolific. I know I could maybe have a leopard slug to help me, where I keep it contained and collect invasive molluscs for it, but if in doing so I decrease the population of leopard slugs (even though they're introduced), then NZ doesn't have any mollusc-eating molluscs to re-replace the leopard slugs.

I also am worried about giving any birds or mammals parasites by giving molluscs to them, because even if the birds/mammals are introduced, it will continue the cycle of hosts for the parasites, and i don't want that. I could give the molluscs to fish in a river, maybe keep 1 wild invasive fish to feed molluscs to, but you see how ridiculous all of this thinking is.

I am wondering if people feel this stressed as I feel, or at least the same type of stress. Even all the earthworms, centipedes, millipedes, woodlice, and skinks in gardens are introduced and replacing the native ones. And it really feels like we as a species will never get on top of this, and that there will always be introduced animals in every continent. But i don't want to sound so hopeless.

I know it’s helpful for the app id suggestions since it only uses the first picture, but someone came through to id and asked me to change the order so that they could id it. Does that make sense? I don’t understand.

When I upload pictures from my pc and I go to edit the observation on my phone it gives me this warning icon with no context. Tapping it doesn’t do anything. The observation has a date and location attached to it from the pc. Is this a bug or is something wrong with the observation?

Hey guys, so I've been using iNaturalist for a week now and have around 50 observations (including a handful of old photos) and it's been fun so far. But my searches so far have been pretty lackluster to say the least, I find myself going out for hours and coming back with maybe 10 or less observations. I've gotten "lucky" here and there with a few somewhat interesting species at least for my standards, and I do photograph common species too but it just feels like everywhere I go is devoid of all life that isn't a chipmunk or robin. I do know of one good spot near me that's pretty biodiverse and is especially good for insects, so I have to ask, am I just not looking close enough? Or does time, place, and weather matter more than skill? I know I'm doing something wrong if I'm seeing all these people in my state who are able to upload like 50 observations every single day

Edit: I took note of some the advice you gave in this thread, and was able to get 51 observations today. However I didn't go out and take pictures of every last plant like some people suggested, I only bothered with what I found interesting. So, thanks.