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iNaturalist is Now an Independent Nonprofit

Spreading Our Wings: iNaturalist is Now an Independent Nonprofit

https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/82010-spreading-our-wings-inaturalist-is-now-an-independent-nonprofit

We have exciting news! iNaturalist is now an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. This is a big day for iNaturalist. Since launching in 2008, the iNaturalist team and organization has evolved, and we’re thrilled about this next milestone. iNaturalist began as a master’s project at the University of California, Berkeley, became a LLC, then joined the California Academy of Sciences in 2014. In 2017, iNaturalist became a joint initiative with the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. Today, iNaturalist is now an independent, US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Over the past 15 years, the incredible contributions from the community have made iNaturalist into one of the world’s most powerful nature platforms. So far, the iNaturalist community has: * Created over 145,000,000 verifiable observations (adding about 1 million per week!) * Grown to 2.7 million contributors * Observed more than 430,000 species We thank the California Academy of Sciences an...

2 comments

jaybirrd

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I just discovered iNaturalist a few weeks ago, and really love using it. You can see what other people have reported in your area and you can try and find them, or you can report the interesting things you notice. I've become much more observant of plants and bugs and such.

KelsonV

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That's something I noticed when I first started using it, too. One of the first things was picking out the different kids of small birds that my brain had previously filed under "small bird." A sparrow here, a finch there, a warbler or a phoebe, those are starlings not blackbirds or small crows, etc.

I'm still not good at telling different dandelion-like species apart, though, and I'm happy to let the app make its best guess on those and let someone else sort them out!