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discussion / Citizen Science  / 28 April 2025

iNaturalist tips & tricks?

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iNaturalist (iNat) may be the most successful citizen science venture ever. Now at over 230 million verifiable reports, 290 000 active users and 5000 publications. It is easy to create collection projects and download data.

  • Do you have any iNat tips and tricks?
  • Have you published a paper or used iNat data in your work?
  • What do you think are the pros and cons of iNat?
  • Feel free to share your account or link your publications here!

I like the iNaturalist Discord forum and am subscribed to the iNatForum as well. I have made an iNat guide, participated in a few local events on iNat, made observation collection groups and connected with a few hobbyists and experts in my field (Entomology). My iNat profile is @amberbc.



Manish Gadhvi
@MGD
Open Source for Nature | Conservation focused Technologist
Learner_Level_1

2 May 2025 3:43pm

I'm new to iNaturalist but I did a personal project recently that made use of it's awesome API.



I used it to fetch only research-grade, open-location spider sightings, then performed a spatial join with Wildlife Trust regional boundary data (via an ArcGIS REST service) using GeoPandas. I visualised the results on an interactive Folium map with clustering, and set up a Prefect workflow to keep the data updated monthly. Final outputs include a clean CSV for analysis and the live map. You can see the project here 

Read "GitHub - mgadhvi/spider-project: This project uses iNaturalist spider sightings and Wildlife Trust boundary data to create an interactive map, helping visitors identify spider species they might encounter in different Wildlife Trust regions across the UK." on GitHub

GitHub - mgadhvi/spider-project: This project uses iNaturalist spider sightings and Wildlife Trust boundary data to create an interactive map, helping visitors identify spider species they might encounter in different Wildlife Trust regions across the UK.

This project uses iNaturalist spider sightings and Wildlife Trust boundary data to create an interactive map, helping visitors identify spider species they might encounter in different Wildlife Trust regions across the UK. - mgadhvi/spider-project

GitHub

Coming from a developer looking to change to nature tech, I found it a well document and easy API to work with :)