The Many Faces of iNaturalist

There comes a moment in many a naturalist’s life when they discover nudibranchs, and lose their mind. For Ken-ichi Ueda, it happened in 2003. New to the Bay Area, he became fixated on the gemlike sea slugs—as well as every other weird, wild California organism Ueda had never imagined during his East Coast upbringing. Every corner of the Bay Area had a new natural surprise. With a biology degree and no job, Ueda birded in Golden Gate Park and hiked the East Bay Hills and tidepooled at Duxbury Reef—where he encountered his first nudibranch, a shimmering Hilton’s aeolid. Ueda, a self-described “giant computer geek,” meticulously documented it all on his blog and Flickr. He wanted to immortalize the moments of discovery—when a kelp fragment transforms from green debris to the cradle for an inch-long nudibranch. Each moment helped him form a relationship with another species. He began imagining a way to combine that discovery and documentation, and to help other nature nerds connect with each other.

Ueda wrote a manifesto for a tech platform he called iNaturalist.org. He enrolled in UC Berkeley’s graduate program in information systems and recruited two classmates, Jessica Kline and Nate Agrin. In their first class presentation, in 2007, the team described iNaturalist in three bullet points: A tool for managing and sharing observations of things in nature. A community for naturalists. And a way to change the world.