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.

Within a few years, they’d built the first two. The iNaturalist website allowed people to upload photographs of species that others could comment on and help identify: a social platform for nature lovers.

Changing the world started after 2010, when Ueda (iNaturalist handle: @kueda) met Scott Loarie, a researcher studying climate change at Stanford. Loarie remembers liking Ueda’s nudibranch bike helmet. Ueda remembers thinking Loarie talked too much. But he warmed up to Loarie after looking up the 39 plants @loarie had posted on iNaturalist from one walk in San Francisco’s Glen Canyon: Loarie, too, was a legit nature nerd. And, Ueda says, a better salesperson. “If I built the house, he brought the party,” Ueda said in a 2019 interview.

Working together, they grew iNaturalist over the next decade from under 1,000 users to 1.3 million by 2020. Ueda and Loarie formed an LLC, then joined the nonprofit California Academy of Sciences, hired their first employees, and partnered with National Geographic. In 2023, with a $10 million seed grant, iNaturalist split off to operate as an independent nonprofit. 

Today, as many as 10,000 people join iNat, as it’s often called, every week. Its 10 million users have uploaded 350 million observations—including hundreds of species new to science or previously thought extinct. For many nature nerds, iNaturalist has become a beloved refuge within an internet that seems like it’s falling apart. For scientists around the world, it has become a trove of biodiversity information. For Ueda, iNaturalist does most of the things he ever wanted the site to do—and so much more. But for Loarie, it’s still not big enough. 

From the start, Loarie and Ueda saw iNaturalist’s purpose differently. Loarie envisioned iNaturalist’s users gathering foundational data that could transform conservation research. Ueda saw such data as a byproduct of a social platform for which the real currency was meaningful connection.

This January, after 18 years, Ueda decided he could no longer reconcile these visions. He quit, citing in part a “fundamental difference” with iNaturalist’s leadership. Ueda’s concerns about where the site is headed resonated with users across the world worrying that iNaturalist’s growth could erode what they adored about the site. “Man, I really hope that they don’t screw this thing up,” says entomologist Michael Skvarla (@michaelskvarla).

Seeking nature’s thrills: At Hellyer County Park in San José, bioblitz attendees hunt for treasure—a spotless lady beetle, a lichen that fluoresces. Some people are iNaturalist newcomers; others are already living “the iNat lifestyle,” and arrive with ultraviolet lights or a backpack full of cameras.

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For Peninsula resident Robin Agarwal (@anudibranchmom), the “iNat lifestyle,” as she puts it, has involved helping people identify nudibranchs in over 100,000 observations. Seattleite Mark Egger (@markegger), a retired teacher and expert on the genus Castilleja, has discovered three new species while using iNaturalist to virtually survey the exuberantly colored paintbrush flowers. Tyler Bishop (@zoology123) translates German papers on non-biting midges so that he can identify observations of the mosquito-like bugs that other people literally brush off. “I wanted to fill a gap that I saw,” he says. Harte Singer (@malacothrix), a chef turned mycologist, uses iNaturalist as a workbench for cataloging California’s mushroom diversity on a molecular level, and has converted his Santa Rosa garage into a fungal DNA-sequencing laboratory. Krissa Klein (@graysquirrel), a freelance naturalist in San Rafael, says iNaturalist is her community: “Ninety percent of the people in my social circle, at this point, I met through iNaturalist,” she says.

For Dan Rademacher (@rademacherdan), Bay Nature’s editorial director from 2004 to 2013, iNaturalist was an invaluable feed of real-time intel on Bay Area nature—a feed that in December 2025 turned into a job as iNaturalist’s head of product. Bay Nature is part of that iNat lifestyle, too: Over the years, the iNat platform has supplied photographs, data, and many contributors, including Ueda, to the magazine’s pages. 

To Merav Vonshak (@merav), iNaturalist is akin to a religion. “I started using it, and I couldn’t stop,” says the entomologist. Fellow users patiently answered all her plant questions. It became her nature diary and helped her gather data to protect nature in her community. This is why, in Hellyer County Park in San José on this sunny spring day, Vonshak is evangelizing. Since 2017, Vonshak has led bioblitzes in South Bay parks, during which people spend an hour or two documenting all the plants, animals, and fungi they can find—which brings more people into the iNaturalist fold. She reminds the 57 attendees that it’s tick season. “So if you see a tick, document it!”  

The word “bioblitz” dates back to 1996, but iNaturalist transformed it from a tedious paper-and-pencil survey into a “high-tech treasure hunt,” as one how-to-bioblitz document put it. Ueda and Loarie worked hard to launch iNaturalist-powered bioblitzes in the platform’s early years: Each event got people looking closer at nature and gathered swaths of data about what was out there. 

Many of the attendees of today’s bioblitz are new to iNaturalist. As volunteers lead them around the park, they marvel at a rodent’s small jawbone, the flash of a western bluebird in a tree. The treasure chest of California nature opens before them. Many have come because it’s listed as a community service opportunity, and they like that their photos contribute to a larger effort. Vonshak has helped hundreds of new bioblitzers learn to use iNaturalist, and she knows the majority, after the event, will at most open the app to post a flower occasionally. They’re what people studying online communities like iNaturalist would describe as “peripheral” users. 

But a few, propelled by the delight of learning about nature, or by connecting with like-minded obsessives, will join the “core”—users like Vonshak, Klein, and Singer. Many of the volunteers at today’s event got started at a bioblitz. Once all the attendees have returned their magnifying glasses and binoculars, grabbed stickers and snacks, and left, Vonshak and crew head out to survey the park in greater detail. “It’s the after-party,” Vonshak says.

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Back in school, Ueda had envisioned iNaturalist as a big tent where everyone—casual or expert—could gather to wonder at biodiversity. “We talked in this really optimistic way,” says Coye Cheshire, a UC Berkeley professor of information science who was the iNat team’s adviser. And it seemed at first that maybe iNaturalist could hold everyone. By 2016, it had operated under the California Academy of Sciences for two years. Codirectors Loarie and Ueda ran iNaturalist in what Ueda describes as the unstructured anarchy “of a band trying to figure out their sounds.” Mostly, Loarie sold iNat’s scientific potential to funders and partners, while Ueda focused on his wheelhouse: working out the nuts and bolts of making iNaturalist better for users. 

It had 250,000 users. For Ueda, it was the perfect size. Some of his observations got identified—not all, which was fine—and he felt a sense of community.

Today, now that its user base is in the millions, iNaturalist has become a scientific powerhouse. Almost 7,000 academic papers have been published using its data—describing new species, rediscovering others scientists thought were extinct, mapping new places animals have arrived, tracking pollinators’ plant preferences. “It’s one of the most important technological revolutions we’ve had in biodiversity science, probably ever,” says Corey Callaghan (@coreytcallaghan), whose University of Florida ecology lab studies the platform’s impact.

But Ueda began to see a rip forming in the big tent. “If I take a hard look at my own work, it’s a failure of the original vision,” he said in a 2019 interview. When so many people posted one observation and left, how could Ueda say iNaturalist had helped them connect to nature? And when he tried to pull people into the iNaturalist fold, he saw few wanted its community aspect—talking to other people about observations, working together on identifications. He came to believe iNaturalist needed to raise a second tent.

“You can make two good products, or one mediocre product,” he says. Gradually, Ueda saw iNaturalist had a solution that could give more users what they wanted. In 2018, other members of the iNaturalist team had developed Seek, a simpler offshoot of iNat. The mobile app uses iNaturalist’s computer vision to suggest identifications for any plant, animal, or fungus you point your phone at. But it doesn’t automatically upload anything to the iNaturalist database, so kids can use it. To Ueda’s surprise, it took off—sometimes even exceeding downloads of iNaturalist. Seek’s casual users wanted a quick answer to what that bird or plant was—and if they never learned anything more, that was still a worthy connection with nature, Ueda figured. “If Seek users aren’t contributing to a global data set, that’s also fine,” Ueda wrote, in the January 2026 blog post explaining his departure. Yet, according to Ueda, iNat’s leadership treated Seek as an “off-brand liability,” not an asset. This attitude was one of the main reasons he quit.

Images: xkcd.com, CC-BY-NC 2.5; Ken-ichi Ueda via iNaturalist, CC-BY; Glenda Walter via iNaturalist, CC-BY-NC; Juan Manuel de Roux via iNaturalist, CC-BY-NC

Loarie disagrees with the characterization. In an email, he wrote, “We don’t see Seek as off-brand at all,” but as part of the iNaturalist ecosystem—helping kids, beginners, and the social-media-averse notice nature. Once they’ve started, maybe some will eventually log on to iNaturalist and start contributing data. “At our core, we’re about citizen science and people working together,” he says. Much of iNaturalist’s funding comes from organizations interested in its scientific mission: The $10 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that enabled iNaturalist to strike out on its own as a nonprofit aims to help it “realize its potential as a global scientific and conservation sensor by 2030.”

Loarie and Rademacher say iNaturalist must keep growing to fulfill this mission. Rademacher’s team is assessing what size iNaturalist should aim for. “For iNaturalist to have the positive impact that we need on nature, we need to reach more people,” says Loarie. But it requires a careful balance: “We can’t lose the community that’s grown up with iNaturalist in the process as well.” And some core users are tiring of the growing pains.

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Ken Schneider’s breaking point came a few months ago. iNaturalist had been a part of the surgical pathologist’s daily routine: “I’d wake up and I’d spend half an hour helping people identify, mostly, arthropods,” he says. Schneider (@kschnei) saw that as more new users joined iNat, they posted more incorrect identifications. It was likely driven by a flaw in the app’s computer vision, a tool that uses AI to suggest identifications. It tended to suggest names that were too specific or inaccurate for species with insufficient data. Users have flagged the issue for years. Fixing the errors “started to be a chore,” Schneider says. “I no longer felt like I was helping people.” He decided he’d rather spend his mornings in other ways. 

Other core users feel overwhelmed, too. “There are far more observations being added than can be identified by the current cohort of identifiers,” iNaturalist reported in December, in its first survey of “active identifiers.” This can affect which data are usable: Only observations with at least one concurring identification—what iNat calls “research grade”—generally make it down the scientific pipeline. “The science piece depends on the people,” says Carrie Seltzer, iNaturalist’s head of engagement (@carrieseltzer). 

The thing is, iNaturalist wasn’t built to be one of the world’s largest scientific databases of biodiversity information, even though that is what it has become. Ueda wanted people to have fun using iNaturalist, first and foremost. So the platform only gathers data on whether a species is present or not—not how many individuals there are, or how long someone spent looking. “I do truly loathe counting things,” Ueda says. Also, iNaturalist’s makers intentionally resisted separating “experts” from everyone else: Anyone can venture to identify a species. And with a few clicks, you can completely delete yourself and everything you’ve ever contributed to iNaturalist.

Ueda, personally, doesn’t mind if identifications drop off. “I don’t need all of my observations to get attention to get the satisfaction that I personally am after,” he says. “I don’t think that’s why you go out and take 500 photos, and then you spend hours whittling it down to 100 photos, and you spend even more hours trying to figure out what’s in all those photos.” Surveyed users say their primary reason for using iNaturalist is to learn about species, not contribute to science and conservation.

But the scientists who rely on iNaturalist do care if iNaturalist users lose interest—and especially if they delete their information. “It’s one of the biggest concerns I have with iNaturalist,” says Lizzy Edson, a data manager at the California Academy of Sciences, who is helping transfer tens of thousands of iNaturalist observations into the California Natural Diversity Database, the state’s official documentation of rare species. After dozens of users threatened to delete their accounts last year, Edson (@longhairedlizzy) wondered how it might impact the data. 

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As often happens lately, the fuss was over generative AI. In June 2025, Klein saw an X post by iNaturalist that the organization had received a $1.5 million grant from Google to use generative AI on the platform. (The computer vision that provides species suggestions is a kind of artificial intelligence, but it does not generate new content.) An iNat community forum thread on the grant blew up. People worried and raged about AI’s water and energy usage, its potential to hallucinate or spread inaccuracies across iNaturalist, and the possible use of their content without permission. They worried iNaturalist, still in its first years as an independent nonprofit, would become hostage to Big Tech’s money.

Ueda was leaving iNaturalist as the firestorm started. “While it didn’t directly lead to my own choice to leave, it is symptomatic of the problems that led to that choice,” he wrote later. He said that iNaturalist’s leadership had ignored warnings from staff that core users wouldn’t like the Google grant, and that most staff were “blindsided” by it too and confused about where the money would go. “If [leadership] do not own their responsibility before staff and before the community, I don’t think they deserve their power. They certainly don’t deserve my trust,” he concluded. 

Meanwhile, the iNaturalist team tried to clean up the damage. The nonprofit’s leadership said they would use the grant to summarize the useful comments people leave on identifications, which Loarie says can be “a needle in a haystack” to track down now. Staff tested the summaries first in a limited demonstration that they said would use as much water as a large water bottle. Loarie met with Klein to smooth things over. “It turns out the iNat staff, like many of the rest of us, tend to be nature nerds who are happier hanging out in a bog with frogs than interacting with people, and thus communication skills may be a little . . . lacking . . . at times,” Klein wrote after the meeting. 

In January, Rademacher announced that iNaturalist planned to improve the computer vision in order to reduce misidentifications and would not pursue the generative AI summaries. The company also began hosting webinars to try to increase the number of committed identifiers. Singer, the chef turned mycologist, says he’s felt a positive shift in how iNaturalist is listening to users: “The doors have been thrown open a little bit.” Meanwhile, Klein took a step back from identifying species, feeling burned by how iNaturalist leadership made decisions. But she has no plans to quit. Neither do most core users she’d seen threatening to leave. “We’re all too addicted to the place,” she says.

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Months since he left iNaturalist the organization, Ueda remains committed to iNaturalist the vision. On a walk in Tilden Regional Park, in the Berkeley Hills, after stopping to examine two variable checkerspot caterpillars, he talks about a new app he’s building. It’s called Chuck, and it’s meant to help people download their iNaturalist data—and exit if they wish. 

Ueda still uses iNaturalist. He doesn’t want anyone to quit. But he wants the platform to be reimagined. “Users don’t currently have any effective control over the staff and board,” he wrote. “But you do control the lifeblood of iNaturalist: participation.” He thinks iNaturalist should emulate the governance model of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia. Just over half of Wikimedia’s board is elected by and from the Wikipedia core community. Wikipedia itself—conceptually, iNaturalist’s “older sibling,” according to Ueda—is run entirely by complex hierarchies of volunteer editors. 

Ueda’s also thinking about iNaturalist replacements. “When you start thinking of something as indispensable, and you don’t really have control over it, that’s a point in time where you should be thinking of backups,” he says. He proposed building a decentralized version of iNaturalist in his departing blog post. “One person said, ‘Hold my beer,’ and started working on it,” he says. Like Bluesky, the new platform, observ.ing, will have no central organization making decisions about how things work. Users will govern themselves. They can build the product they want.

“Well, of course, when you build communities online, random good things happen,” Ueda says. Even if, admittedly, good things are harder to expect from the internet today,  “I do actually think that has stood the test of time.”

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Update, June 18, 2026: The year Scott Loarie created his iNaturalist account, and started work with Ueda, was corrected in a text box and the timeline. It was 2010, not 2011.