Do You Enjoy Nature? Do You Like Photography? Would You Like to Contribute to a Scientific Enterprise?
Introducing . . . . iNaturalist
Have you ever come across an unusual plant or animal and wondered, “What is that?”
Now there’s an app for that!
The California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic have partnered to develop iNaturalist, a platform that allows people to connect with experts to identify the organisms they observe and to contribute their photographs/observations to global biodiversity databases. The platform utilizes the power of crowd-sourcing to greatly increase the area over which data is collected, and iNaturalist lets users keep track of their own data, explore data from other parts of the world, crowd-source identifications, learn about nature, find citizen science projects to take part in, and participate in/organize bioblitzes.
So whether you’re photographing the flora during a vacation adventure or snapping cool pix of the beautiful butterflies and other interesting critters at home, let your photos of plants, animals, and fungi contribute to science!
