Let me say first: I was wrong!

My profile shows that I created my account at iNaturalist in August 2008, the year that the site was launched. I created a lot of accounts in those days. At the time, the site was essentially a hobby project powered by Ruby on Rails. There were a lot of those in 2008 – I made some myself – and very few of them lasted long. I liked the ideas behind iNaturalist but I didn’t think it would succeed.

Fast-forward to around 2022/23 when I decided to revisit the site. What do I find? A thriving community with millions of biodiversity observations, which feeds into other important resources such as the Atlas of Living Australia (https://www.ala.org.au). A site that makes me want to contribute, because it’s both enjoyable and useful.

My year in review (https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2025/neilfws) isn’t huge, compared with people who contribute daily (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=phylogenomics&verifiable=any), or as part of their day job (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=xanthosia&verifiable=any), but I still feel good about it. It’s one of the few sites that seems to espouse the values from the “Golden Age of the Web” (2008-2010) – data online, freely-available, validated by experts, for the good of all. Wikipedia is another that comes to mind as does Stack Exchange and, to a lesser degree, YouTube.

Feeling jaded by the AI hype cycle? Try the AI-powered iNaturalist camera, which can identify many organisms with high accuracy almost as soon as you point your phone at them. Amazing.

If you enjoy walking in nature, recording things what you see and finding out what they are, and you haven’t tried iNaturalist yet, give it a go. I’d even go so far as to say that it can have mental health benefits.