The iNat Blog Wayback Machine's Journal

Journal archives for July 2020

July 9, 2020

Updated Updates! 2012-06-06

Some of you may have noticed a couple recent changes over the past month.  Here's a summary of what's new.

NEW DASHBOARD

The dashboard now includes comments on your stuff, comments on things you've commented on and observations you've identified, and new observations from people you follow.

ACTIVITY UPDATE NOTIFICATION IN THE HEADER

The header now contains a red number when you have new comments / identifications on your content or on content you've commented on.

UPDATES EMAIL

We've started sending a single daily email instead of one email for every comment/notification.  It's basically a version of the dashboard content.

PLACE SUBSCRIPTIONS



You can now subscribe to updates from iNat places.  This will notify you of new observations from places you've subscribed to, as long as you're not already following the people who made those observations.  You can also subscribe to specific taxa within a place.  To subscribe, visit a place page on iNat and click the subscribe link in the lower left.

As always, if you have questions or comments, give us a holler in our Google Group.

Posted on July 9, 2020 08:32 PM by carrieseltzer carrieseltzer | 0 comments | Leave a comment

July 11, 2020

iNaturalist reaches 200,000 observations! 2013-03-08

As we gear up for spring in the northern hemisphere, iNaturalist passed 200,000 observations today! From this collection, we are now serving over 45,000 research grade observations to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and over 35,000 trusted images to the Encyclopedia of Life. Thanks to everyone who helped us pass this landmark by adding observations and helping identify observations made by others. The iNaturalist community is charting new territory in figuring out how to transform natural history activity into data for science and conservation. Keep up the good work!

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Observations since iNat's birth as a UCBerkeley Masters project in '08

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iNaturalists tidepooling at Pillar Point yesterday in NorCal.

Posted on July 11, 2020 05:55 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

Facebook and Twitter Sharing 2013-04-06

imageiNat is now sharing your observations on Facebook and Twitter! If you've linked your Facebook and/or Twitter1 accounts to your iNat account (e.g. if you use either of those services to sign in to iNat), you'll now see "Share on" links at the lower right of the observation form

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If you leave these checked, your observation will be posted to Twitter and your Facebook activity log (which means they might show up in your friend's News Feeds). Posts on both sites should include image previews and links back to iNat.

On both Twitter and Facebook, posts will group multiple observations made at more or less the same time. So if you upload 50 observations at once, you'll only get one Twitter and one Facebook post.

If you don't like this sharing, you can turn it off by default by editing your settings.

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If you don't like the fact that we've made this feature opt-out, please let us know! We're a bit ambivalent: we want to promote sharing, but don't want to be spammy. If you think this is more of the latter, give us heck on Facebook, Twitter, our Google Group, or via email.

1 If you've previously linked your Twitter or Facebook accounts, you may need to re-link your account(s) to get this working. To do this, either sign in via Twitter/Facebook, or edit your account to disconnect and reconnect your Twitter/Facebook account.

Posted on July 11, 2020 06:34 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

Community Identifications 2014-01-30

In brief: We're changing the way observations are identified so that the taxon agreed upon by the iNat community will be the primary taxon associated with each observation, i.e. the taxon used in searches, in determining research grade status etc. If you prefer the current system in which an observation's taxon doesn't change unless you change it, you should opt-out some time before February 7, 2014:

  1. Go to http://www.inaturalist.org/users/edit
  2. Uncheck "Accept Community Identifications"
  3. Save your settings

Not so brief: All set? Cool, here's the long version. Currently, you are in full control of the taxon associated with your observation. Everyone else can add identifications, but your observation isn't associated with a taxon until you agree with those identifications.

However, this is a problem for people who don't realize they are responsible for their own data, or for people who just add some observations and then abandon the site. The community puts work into adding identifications, but the observations remain unlinked to taxa and ineligible for research grade status. It's a bummer for identifiers, some newbies, and especially for project owners who often recruit a bunch of one-time users for an event who never return to confirm IDs.

So what we're doing is introducing the idea of a "community taxon," which is sort of like the identification that the community of identifiers agrees on. The algorithm we've come up with is a bit convoluted, but roughly, it chooses the taxon that more than 2/3 of identifiers agree with. You can see an example of this by appending test=cid to any observation added in the last few weeks, e.g.

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/505772?test=cid

If you want the gory details on the algorithm click the "About" link beneath the community ID, or wade through the even more crazy diagrams at https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/88. So far we're just calculating the community taxon without affecting any existing data or quality grade, but what we're going to do is set the community taxon as the primary taxon affiliation for an observation, unless you opt out. This means that if you like the current system of personal control, you will have to set a preference saying you don't want to automatically accept the community taxon as the taxon for your observation, as described above.

You will also be able to reject the community taxon on a case-by-case basis:




Posted on July 11, 2020 07:07 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

½ a million observations! 2014-02-11

We passed 500,000 observations today! Just under half of these (49%) are research quality. You can check out the portion (~188k) thats been archived in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility here . There's still plenty of observations that need to be identified, you can check out some of them here.

So what does 1/2 million observations look like? Here's a breakdown by different types of critters showing both the research quality and casual quality portions:

Posted on July 11, 2020 07:18 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

Heartbleed: Please Change Your Password 2014-04-14

Hey folks, so like 66% of the Web, we were affected by the Heartbleed bug, a massive security vulnerability that was announced last week and potentially allowed malicious actors to spy on encrypted information. On iNat, your data is encrypted whenever you connect to https://www.inaturalist.org (note the https, not http) and you see the little security lock icon in your browser's address bar. We also encrypt all submissions from our mobile apps. We don't really deal in particularly revealing information on iNat, but there is a risk that your password was exposed.

All of our systems were patched last week soon after the announcement, thereby protecting us against any new attacks, but we were only able to renew our potentially compromised SSL certificate this weekend (this is a file provided by a third party that we use to prove to your browser that we are who we say we are and not someone else pretending to be us).

The upshot of all this is that you should change your password at https://www.inaturalist.org/users/edit.

You should probably change your password on most of the rest of the web sites you use as well. For more about Heartbleed, check out

Posted on July 11, 2020 07:25 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

We’re Going to the Academy! 2014-04-26

We're pleased to announce that we've joined the California Academy of Sciences! In business speak we were "acquired," but that sounds so one-sided. We've been working with our friends at the Academy on various projects for over a year now, and we've talked about joining the fold for just as long, so there's nothing one-sided about it. Scott's a native Californian and Ken-ichi's basically a naturalized Californian at this point in his Golden State tenure, so we've both looked up to the Academy for a long time, and we know they're just as passionate about connecting people to nature as we are.

Why are you doing this?

We need the money! Seriously. To date we've sustained ourselves predominantly through project-specific contracts and grants, which has been great, but since they limit the kinds of work we can do to projects other people are willing to fund, there are a number of things we've been unable to tackle. The Academy can offer us the stability we need to address important but unsexy issues like performance and usability.

To be honest, neither of us got into this to run a business. Scott's a biologist, Ken-ichi's a web dork, and we're both naturalists, so we'd much rather spend time doing these things and improving our products than, say, doing our company taxes. Joining the Academy gives us a way to achieve that focus.

And, as you probably know, the Academy is awesome, and staffed by awesome people. It's hard to think of a better community of professionals dedicated to communicating the value of the natural world to humanity. Working alongside the kind of energy and creativity the Academy provides can only benefit us.

What's going to change?

Right now, not much! Our brand won't change, and neither will the core mission and experience of the site and our apps, but in the future we're hoping to hire some new staff, work on ways to make the site faster, and improve our mobile apps. We're not sure about Terms of Service and our privacy policy yet, but no doubt we'll be having that conversation soon and will keep everyone posted.

Scott & Ken-ichi (aka loarie & kueda)

P.S. Here's the press release from the Academy.

Posted on July 11, 2020 07:34 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

New Additions to the iNaturalist Team 2014-09-08

We’re super excited to announce two new members of the iNaturalist team. This month, Alex Shepard and Patrick Leary will start working on iNaturalist full time in the new iNat Department at the California Academy of Sciences.

Most of you have probably noticed that the iNaturalist website receives more love than the iNaturalist mobile apps. Alex Shepard is going to help us change that. His skills combine a rare mix of art and engineering. Alex led iOS development at Eyefi, a photography technology company tackling many of the same issues as iNat. Alex’s engineering experience is balanced with a passion for art—he has a Masters of Fine Art from the San Francisco Art Institute—and for nature. He’s currently iNat-ing his way towards a nature guide to Lobos Creek Valley here in San Francisco.

You have also probably noticed that iNaturalist has been running a bit faster these last few weeks (about 4x faster, actually). This is due to the heroic efforts of Patrick Leary. Patrick has been working in the biodiversity informatics world for over 13 years starting on the uBio (where iNat gets much of its taxonomic data) and later with the Encyclopedia of Life, both of which iNaturalist relies on heavily. Few people combine Patrick’s skills with scaling web architecture with his long experience working in the biodiversity informatics world. Even fewer can claim all that AND the ability to pull bonito out of Buzzards Bay!

We couldn’t have brought on two engineers as talented and experienced as Alex and Patrick without the continued support of the California Academy of Sciences and its commitment to the future of natural history. We’re looking forward to doing great things with these guys and all our colleagues at the Academy!

Posted on July 11, 2020 07:57 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

NatureWatchNZ is Joining iNaturalist 2014-10-11

We're psyched to announce that NatureWatchNZ will be joining the global iNat community starting Monday October 13th! For those who don't know, NatureWatchNZ is a website that uses the same open source code as iNaturalist, but is operated by the New Zealand Bio-Recording Network (NZBRN) for naturalists and citizen scientists in New Zealand. They have a vibrant community, and they've decided to join our larger, global community, because when it comes to the power of crowds, bigger is usually better.

So starting Monday we'll be migrating data over from NatureWatchNZ to iNat. Here are a couple things to keep in mind

  • You'll be seeing a bunch of new people and new observations. Say hello!
  • We won't redirect http://naturewatch.org.nz to point to our servers until our data migration is done at the end of the week, so don't be surprised if people aren't responsive until then
  • Curators can expect to see a bunch of new taxa. If this causes an overwhelming mess, please holler in the Google Group
  • The new website will be temporarily available at http://naturewatch.inaturalist.org

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know in the Google Group.

Posted on July 11, 2020 08:00 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

What does one million nature observations look like? 2014-11-09

Jonathan Hiew is a self-described walker and cyclist from Singapore to whom nature photography only comes naturally when he is desperate to find the names of those flowers he sees along the way. On Friday, Jonathan (aka techieoldfox) made an impromptu decision to take a hike through the Central Cachement Nature Reserve -- he'd been rained out on his last try. The hike produced several pictures of butterflies, wasps, a grasshopper, and a cricket. But one of Jonathan’s butterflies was special. It marked the one millionth observation posted to iNaturalist.

But what does one million observations look like? To find out, we're marking the occasion by launching a new series of interactive maps that, for the first time, allow all of these observations to be visualized together.

When you're zoomed out, the maps summarize the observations as a grid. The darker the grid cell, the more observations it contains. All observations not flagged as captive or as having location issues are mapped. Observations with geoprivacy set to obscured are only included at coarse zoom levels.

At very fine zoom levels, the grid cells are replaced by individual, clickable observations. The colors indicate the branch of the tree of life that each observation represents. White borders indicate 'research quality' observations.

We hope you enjoy these maps. The software driving them was prepared by our collaborators at Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals earlier this year. But it took the support of our new home at the California Academy of Sciences including lots of hard work by Patrick Leary and iNat's new beefed-up backend to share them with everyone.

Some cool maps:
American Alligator
Ladybird Beetles
San Francisco Bay Area

Posted on July 11, 2020 08:55 PM by hannahsun99 hannahsun99 | 0 comments | Leave a comment

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