Crowdsourcing Science: How iNaturalist Observers are Building the Biodiversity Database

RECORDED: April 19th, 2022
We explore iNaturalist and the power of community science with Rebecca Johnson, Co-Director of Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Science! iNaturalist is a biodiversity monitoring tool used around the world by scientists and naturalists at all skill levels. The observations collected by this app have fueled many a valuable research project while engaging folks in nature exploration.
Links Referenced:
iNaturalist: www.inaturalis...
City Nature Challenge: citynaturechal...
Snapshot CalCoast: www.calacademy...

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The density of observations of a species is conditioned on the density of observing done by the human. Thus the iNaturalist observation density is not the same thing as the density of the organism. If the GPS tracks of where the observers walked is provided, then it may be possible to marginalize the species density by the sampling density. I should check out some of the mentioned papers to see how they tackled this problem.