Our (belated) Observation of the Week is this predation scene: a Peppered Moray (Gymnothorax pictus) eating a Thin-shelled Rock Crab (Grapsus tenuicrustatus)! Seen in the United States Minor Outlying Islands by @tluisaw!

(@tluisaw only recently saw my message asking if she would like to be featured as Observation of the Week, which is why this one's a bit late. But it's a good one! - Tony)

Last year Tlell Wolf found herself on Palmyra Atoll, removing coconut trees six days a week for a four month stretch. 

There was once a coconut plantation there that replaced a lot of the native forest and restoration is in progress. Hard work for sure but a really incredible place, I saw interesting wildlife every day. Tons of land crabs, seabirds, and huge vibrant and diverse reefs. I saw sharks every day I was there. For anyone who hacking down coconuts with a machete and snorkeling frequently sounds like a good time, I definitely recommend it!

She came across the gnarly scene above while on the north beach of Cooper Island and says both species are common.

I would often see several morays on a walk. I saw them chase and eat crabs many times. It’s pretty impressive how large a crab they can manage and how quickly they can eat it. It makes a terrible crunch. They will sometimes tie themselves in a knot to rip up the crabs. The one in the photo was extra cool because it was fully out of the water. Other people on Palmyra have gotten cool eel eating crab photos and videos too.

Peppered Morays are widely distributed in the Indo-Pacific and can grow to about 140 cm (4.6 ft) in length. As seen here they do like to eat invertebrates, as well as small fish. Thin-shelled rock crabs are also widely distributed int he Indo-Pacific region. On a personal note, I grew up in Hawaii they’re a common sight on any rocky shoreline.

Tlell (above, prepping a Black-footed Albatross for banding) grew up in the US state of Oregon credits a naturalist mentor in her teen years for her career trajectory. She’s studied frogs in Oregon, birds in Hawaii, and has volunteered on both Palmyra and Kure Atolls. She’s currently residing on Kure Atoll, having spent about six months there and has six weeks or so left. 

It’s an 88 hectare island with over 100,000 albatross and hundreds of thousands of birds from about 20 other species as well. A very noisy place! I feel very fortunate to have the ability and freedom to follow my interests to amazing places like Kure.

Her friend @aburke urged Tlell to join iNat for several years now and she finally did so while on Kure. 

For as long as I can remember, I was interested in exploring and finding cool things outside, catching frogs and snakes, looking at bugs and flowers, investigating dead things. And as long as I had a camera I’ve been taking photos of those things. 

Since getting iNat I have definitely been paying closer attention to species I noticed less before, I’ve been improving my knowledge of many species and now I have a way to keep track of things I see and not forget where or what they are. There have been many species I wouldn’t have been able to ID at all or with any confidence. I really appreciate all the help I get with IDing! There has only recently been internet on Kure, it’s pretty cool to be out here on a tiny speck of land in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean and still be a part of iNat. Most of my observations so far are from Palmyra and Kure but I will definitely keep using iNat in the future.

(Photo of Tlell by Fia from DOFAW. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- here’s some amateur footage of a Moray hunting a rock crab in Hawaii!

- like eels, this snake has to twist and contort its body to break off crab limbs!

- this past Observation of the Week by @uwkwaj also hails from tiny islands in the North Pacific!

- Tlell paints as as hobby and below is her recent work: a Laysan Albatross in both skull and living forms!

iNaturalist has a completely redesigned app available for the iPhone! You can download it from the App Store.

You can log in using your same username and password and see all of your existing iNaturalist observations in the new app.

In-Camera and Offline IDs

If you want to get quick, in-camera identification suggestions (like in Seek by iNaturalist), now you can see them in the in-app camera! Like in Seek, these also work offline.

Match Screen

If you want to see how confident the AI suggestions are, you can check the match screen, which shows your photo alongside photos from the best-match taxon.

Bulk Import

From your photo library, you can now bulk import up to 20 photos at a time and group them into observations.

To access the photo library, long-press on the camera button to reveal additional ways to make an observation.

Configure it like Classic

If you prefer the classic flow where you can immediately edit your observation before saving or uploading, you can configure the new app’s settings to bypass the match screen and species suggestions.

Profile Views

If you want to learn more about the people you interact with, you can now see other people’s profiles in the app.

Explore More

Use "Explore" to easily see species seen nearby when location access is enabled. If you want to see observations on the map (like in iNaturalist Classic), change the view to highlight species instead of observations.

Feedback & Bug Reports

The best way to give feedback and report bugs is using the in-app feedback form. You can find it in the Menu under Feedback. Bugs can also be reported in the iNat Forum.

What's Next?

Currently, the new app is called iNaturalist Next. In mid-April, this new app will be simply renamed iNaturalist. At that time, the current iNaturalist app for iOS will be renamed iNaturalist Classic.

You may want to continue using iNaturalist Classic to add observations to traditional projects until that functionality is available in iNaturalist Next.

Note: iNaturalist Next is not yet available for Android via Google Play. The existing Android app has many features that both iOS apps currently lack (e.g. messages). A version of iNaturalist Next for Android will be released once feature parity is closer.

More than 40,000 species have been recorded on iNaturalist in Canada, yet based on the Wild Species Report, there are an estimated 80,000 species in the country. Canada is one of the countries best represented on iNaturalist, but there are still many geographic areas without iNaturalist activity, and many species still missing or poorly represented.

We’ve partnered with the Canadian Wildlife Federation to try and fill these gaps. Can you help in a national scavenger hunt?

Here are maps showing the locations of Canada museum specimens of species still missing from Canada on iNat. These locations are based on Global Biodiversity Information Facility localities, so they may contain some errors - like the Pacific Barracuda in Manitoba.... If you'd like to help fix these errors, please add your feedback to the notes column for the relevant species in this spreadsheet, But errors aside, we hope this will be a good starting point for looking at gaps from Canada.

Clicking on the points will bring up a link to observations of other species that have been recorded in the vicinity of where the museum specimen was as well as a link to the iNaturalist taxon (species info) page. If the popup doesn’t have a link, it means the species page does not exist yet in iNaturalist.

~500 missing Plants

~3,500 missing Fungi and Similar Organisms

~900 missing Vertebrates

~300 missing Mollusks

~700 missing Arachnids

~10,000 missing Insects (click to load map)

~700 missing Other Invertebrates

How Canadians can help

Were any of these species found near you, or places you visit? This is a chance for you to plan excursions later this year to make observations.

Do you have photos from these places that you haven’t uploaded yet? Now is a good time to upload your backlog.

How you can help outside of Canada

Do you have expertise in any of these taxa? It’s possible that some of these species are already on iNaturalist, but they haven’t been identified yet. You can help by reviewing the observations from Canada that need identification.

Even if you don’t have expertise in Canadian species, you may be able to help clean up some misidentifications. You can filter for observations that may be far out of their known range by sorting the "Identify" page by ascending geo score. The geo score is a measurement of how typical an observation’s location is for that species – the higher the score, the more typical. Observations with low geo scores could be exciting range extensions, cultivated plants or captive animals that should be properly marked, or misidentifications.

We look forward to seeing what you find!

Our Observation of the Week is this Paridotea ungulata isopod, seen in Australia by @moth_nut!

Currently living in Tasmania and working with the Australian National University and researching habitat suitability, threats, and effective management strategies for some of Australia’s most endangered birds, Tom Hunt’s childhood was spent in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. 

Surrounded by bushland and birds, I have been a keen nature lover and photographer for as long as I can remember. That passion eventually shaped my career, taking me across Australia as an ecologist working on conservation projects.

My work is driven by a desire to help, in some small way, to reverse Australia’s alarming extinction rates and protect the wildlife that makes this country so special. As such, I have a particular interest in threatened species monitoring and management. After studying at The University of Adelaide, I spent over a decade working on conservation and restoration projects in South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales. This included researching endangered mallee birds and reintroducing locally extinct mammals through the Wild Deserts project.

Now that he’s in Tasmania, Tom’s begun to explore coastal habitats in earnest.

My partner and I soon found ourselves spending more time exploring the coastline – beachcombing, rockpooling, snorkelling, and diving – using iNaturalist to log and learn about the things we saw. One of our most exciting discoveries came after I saw a few iNat observations of a beautiful sea centipede (Paridotea ungulata) in my local marine reserve at Tinderbox – a rugged peninsula in southern Tasmania fringed by rocky reefs and cold-water kelp forests. I had no idea sea centipedes even existed until I found these local records!

One weekend as we were exploring a shallow bay on the Tinderbox Peninsula, we spotted something bright green attached to a floating piece of Giant Kelp . Intrigued, I swam over for a closer look – and to my delight, it was a Paridotea ungulata. Its vibrant, electric-green body clung tightly to the kelp with its specialised grasping legs. I brought it to shore for a quick photograph before releasing it back into the water. Watching it swim away using its valve-like uropod to propel itself in a rippling motion – remarkably reminiscent of a writhing centipede – was mesmerising.

As an ecologist, few things are as thrilling as encountering a species from a completely new taxonomic group, even more so when you have been given the background knowledge from a source like iNaturalist to make you realise what a special creature it is. My fascination with marine life continues to grow, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for more sea centipedes amongst the host of other exciting finds that await us here.

Isopods like the one seen here belong to the suborder Valvifera, marine isopods commonly known as valvetails due to their valve-like uropods. You can often find them clinging to kelp and other objects if you’re doing some coastal exploration.

Tom (above) joined iNat almost exactly five years ago and wrote some wonderful paragraphs about it to me, so I’ll just present them here in full. 

As a passionate wildlife observer, I use iNaturalist to document the species I encounter – whether at home, on hikes, or while working in the field. For species I’m familiar with, it’s rewarding to log observations in less-visited areas, contributing valuable distribution data. For those I don’t recognise, iNaturalist is like carrying the world’s most comprehensive field guide in my pocket, helping me identify species and discover what I might encounter on my next adventure. It has also helped spark an interest in so many more taxa, from moths and mantises to peas and Proteaceae!

As a researcher, iNaturalist has been an invaluable tool for tracking species distributions and uncovering unusual records. But just as importantly, it allows me to give back – helping others identify wildlife using my own ecological knowledge, particularly given that these contribute to publicly available datasets I frequently use in my work.

One of the most powerful aspects of iNaturalist is its ability to spark curiosity and fuel deeper exploration. The natural world can feel overwhelming – many people don’t know where to begin if they can’t already identify species; the trick is simply having a starting point. Learning a few common species creates a foundation for recognising what’s unfamiliar, making it easier to notice patterns, compare features, and find more information. Traditionally, this kind of knowledge required access to field guides, a mentor, or higher-education study – resources that aren’t always available for many people, especially for lesser-known taxa, or in remote and less-studied regions.

iNaturalist changes this. It’s a free, dynamic, and constantly growing resource that offers detailed, location-based species lists, computer-vision powered ID suggestions, and direct connections to experts. It provides instant feedback and a fast track to deeper engagement with the natural world – across all observable taxa.

In this way, I think iNaturalist is truly game-changing. It doesn’t replace field guides, taxonomic expertise, or academic research, but it enhances them. By creating a two-way exchange of knowledge between citizen scientists and experts, it also accelerates research, conservation, and public interest in nature. In my view, iNaturalist is one of the most revolutionary tools for connecting people with the natural world – and it’s exciting to know its potential is only increasing.

(Photo of Tom by Marike Oliphant)

- iNat staff member and marine ecologist @kestrel tells me that with valvetails, “their color is often based on what they've been eating.” She sent me to this observation which contains three individuals of the same species!

- fish isopods are another type of marine isopod, take a look at two previous fish isopod Observations of the Week, one by @vasilis_stergios, another by @oryzias!

This is the twenty-eighth entry in an ongoing monthly (or almost monthly!) series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist.

Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas is a young naturalist who first crossed my radar way back in early 2020, when I chose a moss observation of his as Observation of the Day. Since then he’s become a phenomenal macro photographer who has his own very helpful YouTube channel, was named the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2024 by the Natural History Museum, and added over 100k identifications on iNaturalist! 

Half Greek and half Canadian, Alexis was born in Germany and has lived there his entire life. 

I spent a lot of time outside in nature as a little kid, and with several close relatives being biologists that scientific view on the natural world was always present for me. I started birdwatching around age 7, and in the 11 years or so since, nature observation in general has become a big part of my life. In the last 5 years, especially through the pandemic, my interest has shifted more toward smaller arthropods, though I am fascinated by all kinds of wildlife.

Alexis’s identification habits have followed a similar trajectory: 

I used to mostly identify European bird observations, but stopped a few years ago as my focus shifted away from birding. In the last few years I have become fascinated by Springtails, and they account for the vast majority of my IDs since then. While I don't have much time for identifying these days, I try and go through recent observations whenever I have the chance and help out on any observations I've been tagged in. [Alexis is among the top identifiers of springtail observations, with nearly 15k as of this writing. - TI] 

Springtails are very tiny arthropods that are found basically anywhere where soil or similar conditions exist. They are hexapods but separate from insects, and they rarely grow more than 6mm in length. Most eat plant and fungal material, but some are predatory. In addition to being amazing looking, most have a furcula, or small appendage, folded under their abdomen which can be released so it hits against the substrate and propels the organism into the air - a good way to escape from predators. 

When identifying, Alexis will usually look up springtail observations in Europe, both at Needs ID and Research Grade levels. 

There are a good amount of local springtail species that are easy to ID/confirm, even with low quality photos - the problem is that there are just as many which are nearly impossible to get to species from photos. Along with the high portion of low quality smartphone photos and false positive AI IDs, this can make it quite a challenge to sift through springtail observations. Luckily I've accumulated a few good online resources and keys to help with identification, many of which are listed on collembola.org (a website that's great for finding comparison photos too).

Along with the more general searches like this, sometimes I will pick out a certain genus or species and do a deeper dive on the ID features, so that I can go through a big batch of observations of that group to try and fix any mis-IDs. 

He’ll also collaborate with other springtail identifiers, such as in this observation. He says,

I've learned so much from the incredibly supportive iNat community, and I love being able to give some of that back through helping others. I also just enjoy the process, and I continue to learn a lot while identifying, whether through interactions with other springtail identifiers or looking closer at a species I am unfamiliar with.

iNat was a big part of getting me more seriously into macro photography, and still plays an important role in my process for identifying and learning more about my subjects. Whenever I am traveling it's also interesting to look through observations in the area in advance, to see what I could find and what to look for.

How does one go about finding and photographing springtails? Alexis has some tips:

The easiest place to find a variety of springtails is in the leaf litter and on/dead wood on the forest floor. My usual method is just to look underneath dead wood in the forest, but there are springtail species adapted to just about any habitat (Including the high slopes of mount Everest and deep underground in caves). The main challenge is just spotting them, since most species are only a couple of millimeters in size or even smaller. Springtails are especially active (and come to the soil surface more) in moist conditions, so it's always worth taking a look after it has rained.

[For photography] get as close as you can. If you have a camera and dedicated macro lens that's great, but even just with a phone there are lots of great options for cheap clip on macro/microscope lenses that allow you to get great close up images! Many springtails need details of the pattern to get an ID, so getting a top down angle is usually most important. Try and get other angles as well if you can, especially if you are unfamiliar with the species. Some springtails also just can't be identified to species from photos at all, so don't worry if an observation only gets to family or genus (although this happens just as much from a lack of springtail identifiers).

I asked Alexis to name a favorite springtail of his and he chose the genus Sminthurides:

These are absolutely tiny and live at the edge of ponds and in swampy areas. They have a really fascinating courtship ritual, males have specialized antennae with which they clasp onto the antennae of the females. They “dance” around face to face like this on the water's surface, which is amazing to watch. I saw these for the first time last year and got one of my favorite springtail photos to date.

- check out Alexis discussing his photography award in this YouTube Video!

- @frankashwood’s giant springtail was an Observation of the Week back in 2023!

- if you're not an expert you can definitely help identify observations on iNaturalist by refining them!

Happy World Taxonomist Appreciation Day! In response to community feedback, we’re introducing a small update to vascular plant curation guidelines on iNaturalist. You can find it here. But in short, for vascular plant curators should now wait for community feedback before resolving "Relationship Unknown" taxa, and we're also considering referencing World Flora Online for Ferns.

Background

For many branches of the taxonomy, iNaturalist follows external references. Keeping iNaturalist in sync with these references is a very important task for volunteer curators. For example, for birds we follow the Clements Checklist which updates annually. Thanks to the incredible hard work of curators like @birdwhisperer crafting taxon changes, iNaturalist is able to stay in sync with Clements as it updates. iNat staff are incredibly grateful for this dedicated volunteer curation work.

For vascular plants, iNaturalist follows Kew’s Plants of the World Online (POWO) as our external reference. Under existing curator guidelines, taxon changes for "Relationship Unknown" taxa (i.e., taxa with no deviations) with fewer than 100 observations are typically made in the direction of the external reference without an embargo period or community review. For example, in the Heath Family that would include Arbutus xalapensis var. texana (30 obs) but not Andromeda polifolia glaucophylla (470 obs) here.

Many iNaturalist users have reached out to tell us that these curator guidelines do not give the community time to work with Kew to advocate for updates and fix errors on the POWO end.

New Experimental Policy

As a result, we’re introducing an experimental change: curators should now open a flag and wait one month before making taxon changes to Vascular Plant "Relationship Unknown" taxa. This allows time for community input before aligning with POWO.

• For taxa with existing flags, the month-long waiting period starts today and ends on April 19.
• If no feedback is received, or if there is community consensus that following POWO is advisable, curators may proceed with the taxon change after the waiting period.

For example, for Arbutus xalapensis var. texana based on research on POWO compose a flag like this:

How to Contribute to POWO Improvements

If you have expertise in vascular plants, please monitor flags for your taxa of interest and help improve POWO by:

• Providing input on flags
  • If you support the change, leave a comment confirming that following POWO is appropriate.
  • If you oppose the change, explain why and suggest alternative actions.
• Requesting updates to POWO
  • If a taxon needs correction, you can contact Kew by emailing bi@kew.org to request an update.
  • Since POWO only includes names registered in IPNI, you should submit names here: https://ipni.org/registration/.
  • Please keep the flag discussion updated with any correspondence with Kew.
• Creating a deviation when necessary
  • If Kew cannot update POWO in a timely manner, curators should create a taxon framework deviation to signal that iNaturalist is diverging from POWO.

Reviewing the Experiment

We’ll check in on this experiment in six months to assess:

• How many flags received no response.
• How many flags were uncontroversial and led to straightforward changes.
• How many flags were controversial, resulting in discussions, efforts to update POWO, or taxon deviations.
• POWO’s responsiveness to update requests.

Based on these findings, we will develop a long-term curation plan for vascular plants on iNaturalist.

Exploring changing the referencing for Ferns to World Flora Online

There has been long running debate within the community about whether POWO is a good reference for the 'fern' vascular plant classes Lycopodiopsida and Polypodiopsida. In consultation with @choess, @sbrobeson, and @joelnitta, we're exploring transitioning the reference for these two classes from POWO to World Flora Online. If we implement this change we'll announce it as an update to this post.

Thank you for all your help observing, identifying, and curating plants on iNaturalist. Vascular plants are our largest group by number of observations, so it makes sense that maintaining a well-curated taxonomy with broad community buy-in is challenging. We truly appreciate everyone's efforts toward this goal.

This April will mark the 10th anniversary of the City Nature Challenge, and iNaturalist is more involved than ever before!

What is the City Nature Challenge (CNC)?

If you use iNaturalist regularly, you've probably heard of the City Nature Challenge (CNC). Maybe you've even participated, or noticed the surge of observations at the end of April. But what exactly is behind this global event?

The CNC is a four-day bioblitz held every April. Cities around the world compete and collaborate to find species, make observations, and connect people with nature in urban areas. It started in 2016 as a friendly contest between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Since then, it has grown into an international event, with 690 cities and nearly 2,000 local organizers participating last year.

How is the City Nature Challenge organized?

The CNC was co-founded 10 years ago by Lila Higgins (@lhiggins), Rebecca Johnson (@rebeccafay), and Alison Young (@kestrel), leads of the Community Science teams at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California Academy of Sciences. Today, these two museums serve as the Global Organizing Team, working with local organizers worldwide.

Each CNC city or metro area has one or more local organizers. These individuals come from diverse backgrounds, including students, educators, and environmental professionals. Local organizers are the heart of the CNC. They encourage their communities to explore and document nature using platforms like iNaturalist. Their efforts help expand the challenge and engage more people each year. The Global Organizing Team provides training, tools, and resources to help local organizers promote and implement the CNC in ways that fit their communities.

City organizers often build partnerships with schools, local governments, and community groups to spread the word. They also coordinate events like bioblitzes, nature walks, and moth lighting to engage participants.

CNC participants in Tuxtla Guitiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico. Photo by Adzuari Cruz Romero.

What role does iNaturalist play in the CNC?

iNaturalist has been the platform powering the City Nature Challenge since 2016 when it was just Los Angeles versus San Francisco, and continues to serve as the primary platform cities use to document nature during the event. This year, it's playing a bigger role than ever. With Alison Young (@kestrel) moving to a new position as the Director of Outreach Programs, iNaturalist is taking a more active role in the CNC in promoting the event and engaging the community. Expect more updates about the CNC as the event approaches!

Results of the City Nature Challenge over the past nine years.

How can I participate in the City Nature Challenge?

Mark your calendar for CNC 2025! Here are the key dates:

• April 25-28: Make observations
  
• April 29-May 4: Upload observations and help with identifications
  
• May 5: Results announced

With just seven weeks to go, now is the time to prepare. You have two ways to participate:

1. Take part in your city’s CNC event – Check this tentative list to see if your city is participating. If it is, you’re all set! Get ready to start making observations on April 25. Want to help promote the CNC in your city or hold an event? Projects are currently being added to the CNC 2025 umbrella project – once you see your city’s project, reach out to the project owners and let them know you'd like to help!
   
2. Join the Global Project – If your city isn’t on the list, you can still take part in the CNC 2025 Global Project. This option is available for anyone, anywhere in the world. The Global Project will count toward the overall numbers of the City Nature Challenge!

Helping with identifications is also a great way to contribute! While observers must make observations in participating cities or join the Global Project, anyone can help identify species worldwide. Taxon experts and dedicated iNaturalist users play a huge role in refining observations and guiding new participants. Every identification helps move observations closer to research-grade status and lets new users know their contributions matter.

We’re excited to bring the world together for biodiversity during the 10th City Nature Challenge!

Acknowledgement: Big thanks to the rest of the global organizing team: Amy Jaecker-Jones (@amyjaecker-jones) (NHM), Sam Tayag (@songdog-st) (NHM), and Olivia VanDamme (@olivia_v) (CAS) for continuing to devote part of their professional time to making the City Nature Challenge run.

Our Observation of the Week is this Ornate Cow Tick (Dermacentor reticulatus, Луговой клещ in Russian), seen in Belarus by @shapomacro!

Ticks! Most people (including myself, and I love arachnids) find them pretty creepy or gross, and obviously they can be very harmful as a disease vector, but as Andrey Shapolov’s eye and photography skills show, they can also be fascinatingly beautiful. “I just like them,” he tells me. “They look quite unusual and interesting. I like to photograph various parasites.”

A macro photographer from Belarus, Andrey became interested in insect and arachnid photography in 2015, and says “I fell in love with nature and its small inhabitants.” The tick photos you see in this post were taken with the Canon MP-E65mm f/2.8 lens, which can provide up to 5x magnification, and are focus stacks of 78 and 198 images, respectively. 

I photographed this tick back in October 2024. I often go out to shoot macro in our park outside our house. We have a small field behind the park where there are a lot of ticks. Since our summers have been quite dry and hot in recent years, the ticks hide. And they only appear in the spring and fall.

A member of the hardbacked ticks (family Ixodidae), the ornate cow tick is found in Europe and western Asia and like other ticks it feeds on the blood of its hosts. Unlike most other blood feeders, ticks can spend days feeding on their host animal and, as Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic writes, 

Ticks use saliva to manipulate the body of their hosts so their bites stay painless, itchless, and as unobtrusive as a bug swelling with blood can be. Scientists have since cataloged more than 3,500 proteins from the saliva of various tick species…

The exact cocktail of a tick’s saliva proteins changes every few hours, [tick researcher José] Ribeiro says. The thousands of proteins in its saliva are highly redundant in function, and the tick cycles through them as a way of circumventing a host’s immune system.

A member of iNaturalist since 2023, Alexey (above, with his macro set-up), tells me “I mainly use iNaturalist to identify the species I have photographed. It really helps me learn new things about insects and spiders.”

- one well known tick-borne disease is Lyme Disease, and some lizards like the Western Fence Lizard have a protein in their blood that actually kills the bacteria that cause Lyme Disease!

- if you’ve been bitten by a tick, here are insctructions for how to remove it.

A Major Milestone for Biodiversity Mapping

We passed a major milestone with today’s update to iNaturalist’s Computer Vision and Geomodel—100,000 modeled taxa!

To mark this achievement, we’re excited to make the Geomodel Expected Nearby Maps available in three key ways:

• As a new iNaturalist Open Range Map Dataset, now available for download.
• As new interactive, downloadable layers on taxon page maps, making species distributions more accessible.
• As part of the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World announced today at the Esri Federal GIS Conference and available soon.

This dataset provides a powerful new tool for researchers, conservationists, and policymakers to better understand and protect biodiversity—a key part of iNaturalist's mission.

What Makes the iNaturalist Open Range Map Dataset Unique?

Understanding where species occur and how their distributions are changing is fundamental to biodiversity conservation. Yet, while satellites provide near-continuous imaging of the Earth, most species distribution datasets remain artisanal—often hand-drawn by experts or based on statistical correlations with indirect environmental variables like temperature rather than direct biodiversity observations.

The iNaturalist Open Range Map Dataset is different:

✅ Built on hundreds of millions of observations from the iNaturalist community.
✅ Improving each month as new observations are added.
✅ A true data-driven complement to traditional range maps, reflecting actual species occurrences.

Mapping Species Richness at Scale

One way to showcase this dataset is by estimating terrestrial vertebrate species richness. The map below was generated by stacking 12,000 individual range maps from the dataset, covering approximately 30% of all terrestrial vertebrate species (12k out of 39k). Areas with higher species richness are shown in red.

Despite known biases towards more 'charismatic' species in this subset of vertebrates, this estimate aligns with established biodiversity patterns, showing peak species richness in the tropics, similar to other global biodiversity assessments (e.g., this study).

Similarly, a map of small-ranged terrestrial vertebrates (species with range sizes smaller than the median for their group) highlights endemism hotspots in regions such as the Andes and Madagascar, corroborating findings from other biodiversity studies (e.g., this study).

A Long Road Ahead—But a Clear Path Forward

The maps above focus on terrestrial vertebrates where 30% of all species are in the model. However, the gaps are much larger for other groups. Across all described species, while iNaturalist has documented ~25%, we currently have enough observations to model only 5% of them.

However, where data exists, our models produce accurate, dynamically updated species distribution maps. This gives us hope: if we can continue growing the iNaturalist community and fill in species and geographic gaps, we can provide the conservation community with the high-quality, dynamically updated species distribution data it urgently needs.

Filling the Gaps—Together

To reach the next milestone—200,000 taxa modeled—we need to expand both taxonomically and geographically.

• Taxonomic Expansion: Observations of lesser-known species, such as insects, plants, and fungi, are critical for increasing coverage beyond well-documented terrestrial vertebrates.
• Geographic Expansion: The map below is a copy of the terrestrial vertebrate species richness map from above where H3-4 hexagons with fewer than 100 observations of modeled species are grayed out. These gaps represent missing data, but they also represent an opportunity.

By engaging more observers and identifiers worldwide, we can fill these gaps, refine our models, and build an open, data-driven map of life on Earth.

Join us in making this vision a reality! Click the map to zoom in. Can you help spread the word about iNaturalist to help fill these gaps?

We released v2.20 today which is our first model with over 100,000 taxa! It has 805 new taxa compared to last month's 99,545 taxa and is trained off data exported on January 19, 2025.

We're celebrating this 100k milestone by releasing the iNaturalist Open Range Map dataset.

The graph below shows model accuracy estimates using 1,000 random Research Grade observations in each group not seen during training time. The paired bars below compare average accuracy of model 2.19 with the new model 2.20. Each bar shows the accuracy from Computer Vision alone (dark green) and Computer Vision + Geo (green). Overall the average accuracy of 2.20 is 88.7% (statistically the same as 2.19 at 89.8% - as described here we probably expect ~2% variance all other things being equal among experiments).

Here are the new taxa since the last model:
Plants • Mammalia • Reptiles • Other Animals • Mollusks • Birds • Protists • Fishes • Fungi • Amphibians • Arachnids • Insects

Thank you to everyone in the community who contributed the observations and identifications for all of the newly added species!