300 million eyes on nature
In August 2025, iNaturalist passed the milestone of 300 million observations of wild species, submitted by 4.3 million users. This global network of amateur naturalists has become one of the largest occurrence databases of living organisms — and a major resource for science.
In August 2025, iNaturalist passed a milestone: 300 million observations of plants, animals, fungi and other organisms, submitted by 4.3 million active users worldwide.
To understand what this figure represents: the best professional naturalist databases took decades to accumulate a few million records. iNaturalist produced 300 times as many in under fifteen years — with smartphones and enthusiasm.
This is not trivial. The platform has fed more than 4,000 scientific publications. Its data enable the monitoring of invasive species, the mapping of declining pollinators, and the detection of threatened species populations that nobody suspected existed. When you photograph a butterfly in your garden and the algorithm identifies it in two seconds, you are contributing to a planetary observatory of life.
Technology here does not replace naturalists: it multiplies their reach. Every photo submitted is a data point that persists, compares, and teaches. The AI model that identifies species is trained on those very same observations — a virtuous loop where the more people look, the better the system sees.
Three hundred million human gazes turned towards nature. That is no small thing.
Further reading: The AI That Counts Species: When Artificial Intelligence Serves the Living World