You have been reading reviews about maths, chemistry, engineering, academics, photography, art and craft, etc., but not much about nature so what about the nature loving kids? Don’t frown, as without wasting much time we are going to embark on iNaturalist — a site for nature lovers where they can record, see, meet and learn about the natural world that include living organism, from plants to reptiles, birds and to animals.

iNaturalist is a citizen science website that crowd-sources images and data about wildlife and flora from all over the world. It was started in 2008 by a group of U.C. Berkeley grad students as their Masters final project.

The site describes itself as a “place where you can record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers and learn about the natural world.” So to kick start, users can browse most parts of iNaturalist without making an account, however, if they wish to contribute their observations, or help in identifying a species, make comments and use other interactive features, they do require to sign up for a free account.

The main menu is at top and users can enter the site from these five main points.

The first is ‘Observations’, this provides an updated stream of observations (pinned to a map) displayed in reverse chronological order. The next is ‘Species’, it provides a categorised view of observations organised into parent-level biological kingdom classifications that go all the way down to the species level.

Then there is ‘Projects’, where collaborative observation groups focus on a particular species, region, or institution. While ‘Places’, allow you to focus on all of the species that can be found in a particular locality, such as a country, state, county, city, open space, etc. and lastly ‘People’, which lets the user find other iNaturalist users.

Contributing Observations to the website is a piece of cake. One can upload photos directly to the website, or connect their iNaturalist profile to Flickr or Picasa account and pull in photos that there already are.

It is not wrong to say that our world is filled with naturalists, and many of us record what we find. And isn’t it a great idea if all those observations could be shared online! If your friend has a beautiful wildflower or you have seen the different stages of a bird making its nest why not share the beautiful natural episode with the world on http://www.inaturalist.org

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 16th, 2015