Rod Page recently alerted me to iNaturalist. This is a very beautiful website that invites you to “record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world”. It is essentially a mashup of content from Wikipedia and flickr, pinned around the Catalogue of Life classification. Users can submit their own observation data linked with photos through their flickr account, and build life lists of the species they have seen. There are Google Map mashups and a neat time-line that allows users to see the date of their observations (something that would be vital for birders). You can also submit requests for species identifications through a forum, along the lines of the flickr group “ID Please”.

iNaturalist stands out for several reasons. It has multiple user entry points (not just species pages), it has plenty of content (thanks to Wikipedia) and a participatory component (making is personally relevant to users). All three of these make iNaturalist distinct from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) project, although EOL has ambitions in all these areas. The fact that iNaturalist is a masters project by three students at UC Berkeley's School of Information (Nathan Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda) makes it all the more impressive.

As a selfish scientist the part of iNaturalist I’m most interested in is the life list component. I need a tool that helps me keep track of all my natural history observations, and give me an overall sense of what I've seen and when I saw it. This is distinct from the hard-core science observations I make, which sit in other databases for various reasons. I use my flickr account as a kind of life list (I haven’t seen something unless I photograph it – much to the frustration of my birding friends) but flickr lacks the organizational tools to help me summarize and add context to what I’ve seen. iNaturalist has the potential to fill this gap. I identify, tag and geolocate all my pictures using annotations in flickr, and with over 1500 pictures (though many are not natural history related) I was hoping iNaturalist would crawl my picture library and automatically suck out relevant natural history images and all the annotations. It could do this using the Catalogue of Life index (or better yet – uBio’s namebank since this would help with misspellings and deficiencies in the Catalogue of Life), and would completely automate the building of my life list. Alas, for the moment I have to add pictures to iNaturalist one-by-one and re-annotate everything again (something I am not going to do). On a related note I would also want a badge (something I could place on my blog or website) listing my latest observations and the species I have seen. If iNaturalist were to implement these, they could reach their initial goal of 1,000 species observations in a matter of minutes, and get a lot of traffic through the badges on people sites.

It is early days for iNaturalist - but with a bit more automation the potential is there for this to become a really useful tool in the very near future.