iNaturalist

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iNaturalist is a nonprofit community-driven platform where users can share their observations of biodiversity across the globe. It serves as a social network for nature enthusiasts, scientists, and the general public to document and discuss their findings in nature.

By contributing to iNaturalist, users help create open scientific data about biodiversity. The submitted observations—whether of plants, insects, birds, or other organisms—contribute to mapping the state and health of these species. This data is shared with other biodiversity databases and platforms, including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and can be used as open data by scientists worldwide.

You can contribute observations via its website or by using one of its mobile apps.

An iNaturalist observation on the iNaturalist website
Creating and editing an observation on mobile
Screenshot of creating an observation in the iNaturalist iOS app

iNaturalist and Wikimedia

iNaturalist observations (images, videos, sounds) and data can (often) be re-used on Wikimedia projects. iNaturalist itself shows info about species by displaying Wikipedia articles.

This page collects resources related to iNaturalist for Wikimedians, Wikipedians, and the Wikimedia movement.

iNaturalist observation copyright licensing

When making an observation on iNaturalist the default license used on the site is the closed license CC BY-NC 4.0. In order to make observation images reusable in WikiCommons, Wikipedia and Wikidata users need to change this license to an open license i.e. a CC0, CC BY 4.0 or a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. One of the main aggregators of iNaturalist observations is GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. This aggregator only accepts CC0 and CC BY licensed observations.

It is recommended that Wikimedians using iNaturalist change the iNaturalist default copyright license to a CC0 or CC BY 4.0 licence.

Information on how to change the copyright licensing in iNaturalist can be found in this iNaturalist community post and in this UK based youtube video.