INaturalist
| Type of site | Citizen science | 
|---|---|
| Available in | 56 languages | 
| Area served | Worldwide | 
| Founder(s) | 
 | 
| URL | inaturalist | 
| Commercial | No | 
| Registration | Optional | 
| Users | 8.5 million registered users (March 2025) | 
| Launched | 2008 | 
| Current status | Active | 
iNaturalist is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist may be accessed via its website or from its mobile applications. iNaturalist includes an automated species identification tool, and users further assist each other in identifying organisms from photographs and sound recordings. As of 17 March 2025, iNaturalist users had contributed approximately 230,396,279 observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide, and 290,007 users were active in the previous 30 days.
iNaturalist serves as an important resource of open data for biodiversity research, conservation, and education, describing itself as "an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.” It is the primary application for crowd-sourced biodiversity data in places such as Mexico, southern Africa, and Australia, and the project has been called "a standard-bearer for natural history mobile applications." Most of iNaturalist's software is open source. It has contributed to over 4,000 research papers and is widely used by scientists, land managers, and conservationists worldwide. The platform has also been active in the discovery and rediscovery of new and previously assumed to be extinct species.