I, Naturalist

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In 2021, when he was 17, Prakrit Jain’s mother drove him to a dry lakebed in the Mojave Desert and waited nearby, stargazing, while her son crouched to probe beneath loose rocks and logs. The moon was just a crescent, a good time to look for scorpions, which glow greenish-blue under UV light. Some biologists suspect the fluorescence may help the poorly sighted creatures sense moonlight and stay hidden. For Jain, it makes them visible. He loves the pitch-dark nights when all he can see is the glow of their exoskeletons in the beam of his flashlight. “You have to walk very slowly and carefully,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun.”

By then, Jain had already spent years photographing and identifying scorpions, but the one he found that night was special: It was new to him, and yet he’d seen it before.

A photo of it, along with GPS coordinates, was posted on iNaturalist, the citizen science social network he’d been using since he was 8 or so. Jain and his research partner, then fellow high schooler Harper Forbes, had suspected for at least a year that it could be a new species, but it wasn’t until Jain spotted it in the wild that the budding naturalists would be confident enough to begin the yearlong process of formally giving it a name: Paruroctonus conclusus.

While most people his age go down rabbit holes as they scroll through Instagram or TikTok, Jain gets lost scrolling through flora and fauna on iNaturalist, a digital platform and smartphone app originally created in 2008 at Berkeley’s School of Information, the master’s project of I School students Nathan Agrin, Jessica Kline, and Ken-ichi Ueda.

For Jain, iNaturalist is just as alluring. “There are definitely rabbit holes to go down,” he says. “You’ll find some strange species.” As of early 2025, he has posted more than 2,800 observations.

Harper Forbes, Lauren Esposito, and Prakrit Jain working together to name a new species of scorpion

iNaturalist functions like a digital crowdsourced field notebook. Users upload photos of any organism they find (plants, animals, fungi), and an algorithm suggests an initial species match. Then, a global community of more than 3 million scientists, naturalists, and curious amateurs weighs in, making their own suggestions through comment threads, akin to those on X (though mercifully free of bickering). If enough users agree, the identification is marked “research grade.” While not foolproof, 95 percent of these are estimated to be correct.

The photo of P. conclusus had sat on the platform for six years, misidentified, without consensus. The teenagers noticed features that set it apart from all other members of Paruroctonus—its unique setal counts and morphometric ratios, deeply scalloped pedipalp fingers, and specific patterns of fuscous pigmentation. So they reached out to their connection Lauren Esposito, a leading arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences, who helped them formally describe and document the new species.

Today, Jain is a junior at Cal majoring in integrative biology and has discovered in total three new species of scorpions—all of which he first spotted on the platform. “iNaturalist has been one of the most useful educational tools for me,” Jain says. “Even now, when there’s some organism I want to learn about, the first thing I’ll do is go on iNaturalist, see where people have recorded it, see if they’ve said anything along with their observations.”

He has always loved hiking and “looking at biodiversity,” but it wasn’t until he started attending the wildlife events in the early days of the platform, in the mid-2010s, that he began to see biodiversity research as something he could actually do. In iNaturalist BioBlitzes—gatherings where experts and amateurs fan out to document every living thing they can find in a given area (think block party for ecology)—he found friends and mentors, some of them even Berkeley researchers who would later become his professors.

It’s users like these who have turned iNaturalist into what the New York Times’ Amy Harmon once called “the nicest place online,” a rare corner of the internet “where people with different points of view manage to forge agreement on what constitutes reality.” Some users say the platform even gives them hope in the face of the climate crisis, something other than doom and gloom environmentalism. In the platform’s monthly newsletter runs the tagline: “Together, we’re a force for nature.”

As of May 2025, iNaturalist users have logged more than 240 million observations worldwide, representing at least half a million unique taxa, or nearly a quarter of all known species on Earth.

iNaturalist’s AI, trained on its own massive dataset, can, since 2017, recognize and suggest labels for species—among the earliest systems using AI image recognition on a big scale for such ends. It’s this feature that explains the wild popularity of iNaturalist’s sister app, Seek, which uses image recognition to identify species users spot with their phone camera. The app has accomplished something most social media has failed miserably at: making people feel more connected to, and curious about, the world outside, while still on their phones.

iNaturalist observations surge from 2008 to 2024

That is as it should be, believes iNaturalist cofounder Ken-ichi Ueda, MIMS ’08. “We normally think of our phones as a way that other people monetize our attention.… But when I was growing up, a small computer that you held in your hand was a tricorder on Star Trek,” Ueda says. “When people were dreaming about the future of mobile computing, it was always like, ‘How cool would it be to have a computer in your hand?’”

A self-described “big nature dork,” Ueda was raised in Connecticut and, thanks to his avid gardener mother and fishing-enthusiast father, was surrounded by nature for as long as he can remember. “Fun for me was wandering around the woods and turning over logs and looking for salamanders,” he says. “That’s just how I’m wired.”

No surprise, then, that he went on to major in biology. But despite his passion for studying organisms, he graduated from Williams College with zero direction. “I didn’t know what to do with my life, and I had friends who did know what to do with their lives—and that involved moving to California.” So, in 2003, without any job prospects, he relocated to a shared apartment in San Francisco.

The move was pivotal. “I didn’t know all the birds or the plants [in California]. It was really exciting because I had to learn from scratch,” he says. But this time, he was learning as an adult—with digital cameras and in the early days of social media. He posted photos to Flickr and blogged his findings, while also learning about local birds on listservs.

Ueda found himself wishing for a single place to store his and other naturalists’ observations, and wanted to be the person to create it. He couldn’t find the motivation to start until he stumbled upon a rather ambitious fix. “The School of Information at Cal, the master’s programs, have the option to do a practical final project,” he says. “I really went to grad school with the intent of building iNat.”

Early in the program, two of Ueda’s classmates, Nathan Agrin and Jessica Kline, joined the project. “iNat [is] as much a product of their work as it is mine,” Ueda insists. Together, they built a working prototype, a “digital field journal” that mapped nature sightings and collaborative species identification, and ultimately launched the site. “I’d use it occasionally, like if I was going on a hike or something. But there was no community there. It was an idea out on the web,” says Agrin.

After graduating in 2008, Ueda maintained iNaturalist, which remained a platform with a handful of users, in his spare time while working as a software developer at Goodreads.

Person holding phone using the iNaturalist app to identify species.

In his 2023 keynote speech to I School graduates, Ueda told the story of what happened to get iNaturalist to the next level. He recounted how Scott Loarie, who in 2010 was a Stanford ecologist studying how climate change affects species migration, was giving a talk at Berkeley. Loarie discussed the challenges of tracking smaller species and, in Ueda’s retelling, said something like, “We need this giant group of people with their smartphones, taking pictures of organisms so that we can have this giant database that’s going to rival all the satellites.”

Ueda wasn’t there, but “someone I knew was in the audience and was like, ‘Are you talking about iNaturalist?’”

A meeting was soon arranged. Loarie, an ambitious academic type, had lunch with Ueda, a self-deprecating founder who showed up wearing a bicycle helmet that looked like a nudibranch. (“I thought it was cool,” Loarie says.) Influenced by what he calls the “miracle years” in the Valley, Loarie enthusiastically shared the grand vision he had been touting for scaling biodiversity science—pitching it to a founder he would later learn had little patience for verbal excess and who he noticed is often “suspicious of ulterior motives.”

“‘Wow, this guy talks too much,’” Ueda thought, “not unlike several other people with big ideas and big plans for iNat who’d approached me in the two years since leaving the I School.”

Tempted to dismiss him, he instead used his “really good mechanism for testing folks out,” he recalled in his 2023 speech. Did they upload any observations to iNaturalist? “If they didn’t, that meant they didn’t jump that lowest hurdle; they didn’t even sign up for an account; they didn’t even try to use this thing that they were trying to exploit.”

Loarie, user number 477, had uploaded more than 60 observations, from a colobus monkey in Tanzania to native plants on a hike in Glen Canyon. “My emotional read was totally wrong,” Ueda said. “Scott was like me. He wasn’t just talking about weird bugs and plants—he cared about them.”

What followed was an unlikely partnership. “He still annoys the hell out of me a lot of the time,” Ueda shares. “But when he’s like two minutes into a monologue, I know that, like me, he’d probably prefer to be looking at a newt.”

Each had their own vision for the platform. Loarie focused on scaling it to create “a global movement for nature,” while Ueda envisioned a tool to allow individuals to connect with nature.

But first they needed to survive their startup “garage band” phase, as Loarie puts it. The two would work at night, on weekends, between lectures and code reviews. “My day job was being a postdoc at Stanford and lecturing at Berkeley,” Loarie recalls. “But really we were just trying to get iNaturalist off the ground. That was kind of a cool time.”

In 2011, they launched iNaturalist’s first app (it was a website until then). Loarie spearheaded campaigns like the Global Amphibian BioBlitz, nudging the public to look beyond charismatic species to humbler ones—frogs, insects, fungi. Observations surged.

iNaturalist founder Ken-ichi Ueda and executive director Scott Loarie

Eight-year-old Jain joined in 2012, part of the platform’s earliest wave of users. Also among them was Faerthen Felix, who would wander the woods of Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station with her phone, snapping photos of wildflowers and uploading them to the app. Felix, then the assistant manager of the 9,000-acre experimental forest tucked into the Sierra Nevada, found that iNaturalist gave her “a lens to drill down” and learn more about the place.

From the outside, she says, “it probably [looked] like I was dodging work to go play outside.” But to Felix, the app’s professional potential was obvious. Preserves like Sagehen are chronically underfunded, she says, and volunteers are essential. But coordinating them takes time, money, and staff. With iNaturalist, volunteers could upload photos with little training.

In 2012, Sagehen began collaborating with iNaturalist to organize BioBlitzes. Loarie and Ueda would drive up from the Bay to Sagehen, give talks, and help run the events as a way to increase users on the platform. Over time, more people showed up, and Sagehen’s iNaturalist project produced thousands of observations.

“Scientists were contacting us and visiting to do work because of this data,” Felix says.

Not everyone at Sagehen was immediately convinced. “When it started, it was kind of a hard sell,” she says. “They kind of thought I was wasting time.” But to her, it was worth the try. Visitors, she reasoned, “were running around taking pictures of flowers anyway.”

One byproduct of all the “running around” and research that goes on in nature reserves like Sagehen is species collections—pressed plants, mounted animals and birds. Such inventories serve as ecological Rosetta stones, often answering questions their collectors didn’t anticipate. DNA from decades-old specimens, for example, helps inform conservation efforts today.

“There’s all this dark data out there that no one knows about hidden in these drawers and cabinets everywhere,” Felix says. “Little, tiny collections like ours” that focus intensely on one place.

Those collections were at risk, however. Maintaining physical specimens is expensive, and Sagehen’s archives, built up since the 1950s, were vulnerable to being thrown out. The team began photographing and transcribing label data, then uploading them to an online database called Symbiota, where researchers all over the world could access it. Concurrently, every new herbarium specimen at Sagehen got a corresponding iNaturalist observation.

Felix sees this hybrid approach of physical and digital collections as a step forward. With each new iNaturalist observation, reserves can “advertise what is here to potential researchers, collect way more observations than we could ever have physical specimens, and track distribution and changes over time.”

Sagehen’s digital collections have since contributed to hundreds of research publications.

“I feel pretty vindicated,” Felix says. “It turns out that this is also really a powerful way to do science.”

While the team at Sagehen was digitizing its archives, iNaturalist was moving out of its proverbial garage. In 2014, it was acquired by the California Academy of Sciences. A partnership with the National Geographic Society was also forged, leading to their first major joint BioBlitz, at Golden Gate National Recreation Area. By 2016, the collaboration had scaled dramatically, with over 100 BioBlitzes organized nationwide.

Today, among the more than 5,000 scientific publications that draw on iNaturalist’s massive troves of data—openly available under a Creative Commons license—is one on Deepbiosphere, an AI model developed by the multidisciplinary MoiLab, led by Berkeley biologist Moisés Expósito-Alonso.

The researchers linked iNaturalist observations with satellite images using convolutional neural networks, a deep learning method. By identifying patterns in the data, the Deepbiosphere model was able to estimate the present-day ranges of more than 2,000 plant species across the state, with resolution as fine as a few square meters. It’s one of the highest resolution maps yet of plant distributions in California and can detect changes over time, such as scars left by wildfires.

Satellite images showing forest before and after the Rim Fire, alongside a heatmap predicting ecological change.

Climate change has sped up ecological shifts that once took centuries, says Lauren E. Gillespie, a computer science Ph.D. student at Stanford and first author of the research. That rapid pace makes it both harder and more urgent to track biodiversity, and citizen science data can be a key tool in solving the problem, she says.

The model’s predictions have held up against field data, sometimes even outpacing human analysis. Now, the team is working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Native Plant Society to turn Deepbiosphere’s maps into practical conservation tools.

“Being an engaged citizen by [contributing] citizen science data is helping you not just interact more and better with the world around you, but is also helping scientists try and understand global change more broadly,” Gillespie says. “Every photo counts.”

There are plenty of stories to bear this out. In Big Bend National Park, Texas, a photo of an unfamiliar plant, uploaded by a volunteer, drew the attention of botanists who identified it as not only a new species, but an entirely new genus. Meanwhile, the New Britain goshawk, a species that hadn’t been observed in more than 50 years, was rediscovered after a photo of one was unassumingly posted from Papua New Guinea by a user who had no idea the bird was vanishingly rare. Hundreds of other lost species have likewise been rediscovered. In Australia, uploaded photos of invasive species trigger weekly alerts to give authorities a head start in containing potential outbreaks.

Some time around 2020, Ueda said in his keynote speech, South African police arrested a man with a bag of illicit succulents and a phone full of location photos, allegedly sourced from iNaturalist. Because of the specter of such abuses, precise location data for sensitive species is obscured.

Jain, for instance, chose to obscure the coordinates of his P. conclusus observation. The species, he says, is site-endemic, found only in the Koehn Lake area, on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and currently zoned for development under the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan. If development proceeds, Jain warns, it would be “almost certain to lead to the extinction of the species.”

He has proposed expanding the nearby Desert Tortoise Research Natural Area—a protected BLM zone—to include the habitat of P. conclusus, but says the effort has been politically challenging.

“In an ideal world,” he says, “I would be happy just working on biodiversity science, not having to think about conservation and land use management.”

These days, between classes and fieldwork, he has been working on petitions to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the species as critically endangered, while adding to his growing collection of iNaturalist observations. Last year, he and partners captured the first-ever photo of the elusive Mount Lyell shrew—and is nearing his goal of photographing all known species of scorpions in California.

What excites him the most, though, are the ones still unnamed. “There are millions of species quite likely left,” he says. “I think I’m never going to run out of stuff to look for.”

Nathalia Alcantara is the production editor at California magazine.

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