An app called iNaturalist is helping to find rare species, some of which are being classified as new species. Users document plants and animals by taking pictures of them via the app. The photos are directed to a citizen science website, where “amateur and expert naturalists help identify the species.”
Departments like the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department host gatherings for users. Annika Lindqvist has attended some of the gatherings. “Bugs have become my obsession,” says Lindqvist. Lindqvist has uploaded 2,000 observations on her profile.
Lindqvist belongs to a group of 250,000 users. Collectively, they’ve uploaded 3 million observations. The group has done more than just captured observations though.
For example, in 2013, a man in Colombia took a picture of a peculiar red and black frog. After uploading it, a poison frog expert in Washington, D.C., determined that it was a new species. The pair shared their results in the peer-reviewed journal Zootaxa.
Another great discovery was in 2014. A man traveling in Hon Cau island, and archipelago off the southeast coast of Vietnam, uploaded a photo of a snail. Weeks later, a Malaysian malacologist who specializes in the snails of Southeast Asia recognized the snail. It turned out to be a Myxostoma petiverianum, a snail that had not been seen in over a hundred years.
iNaturalist.org was the result of a Master’s project back in 2008 at the UC Berkley’s School Information. Ken-ichi Ueda was one of the students working on the project, and he now works full time on the site with Scott Loarie, Alex Shepard, Patrick Leary, and Joelle Belmonte.
Loarie says that the goal of developers like him is to engage a mixed crowd in science. They want to attract both formidable experts and teenagers who simply want to explore their backyards. With more than 8 million species on Earth to explore, iNaturalist has a good chance of keeping gamers entertained for a while.
