Strengths and Challenges of Using iNaturalist in Plant Research with Focus on Data Quality

iNaturalist defines itself as an “online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature” and it is likely one of the largest citizen science web portals in the world, as every year millions of observations across thousands of species are gathered and collectively compiled by an engaged community of nearly 3 million users (November 2023). The strengths and potentialities that explain the success of the platform are reviewed and include, among others, its usability and low technical requirements, immediacy, open-access, the possibility of interacting with other users, artificial-intelligence-aided identification, versatility and automatic incorporation of the validated records to GBIF. iNaturalist has, however, features that scientists need to carefully consider when using it for their research, making sure that the quality of observations does not limit or hinder its usefulness in plant research. While these are identified (e.g., the lack of representative photographs for many observations or the relatively frequent identification errors), we provide some suggestions to overcome them and, by doing so, improve the use and add value to iNaturalist for plant research.

This research was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain (project PID2020-119163GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya, Government of Catalonia, Spain (“Ajuts a grups de recerca consolidats”, grant no. 2021SGR00315). The Research Center of the Universidad Espiritu Santo funded part of this research (2022-ING-002, to Ileana Herrera). Mario Mairal and Pedro Jiménez-Mejías were supported by Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología - Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Project FCT-22-17747).

Peer reviewed