iNaturalist

Have you ever participated in citizen science? Do you want to? One of the most popular platforms for crowdsourcing biodiversity data is iNaturalist. In addition to being a great science tool, the iNaturalist app can help you identify the organisms you encounter every day. We talked to Executive Director Scott Laurie about how scientists use iNaturalist. We also got to discuss what makes iNaturalist’s AI species recognition so good, and how citizen scientists are constantly providing high-quality training data. Listen in and learn how this fun-to-use tool works, where it's headed, and how you can get involved.

Guest

Scott Laurie: Scott is the Executive Director at iNaturalist. “Scott has BS & MS degrees in biology from Stanford and a PhD in environmental science from Duke. Scott was a research fellow in Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institute for Science and a lecturer in Geography at UC Berkeley with research focusing on global biodiversity loss from African elephants to the California flora. He co-directed iNaturalist with Ken-ichi from 2011-2023.”