Scott Loarie, Executive Director of iNaturalist, presenting at the 2025 CAPS meeting, in front of a screen with photos of people collecting images.

How can people who might not see themselves as scientists have fun while contributing to science and making a difference in our world?

Over the next few days, I’m here at the Conference for Advancing Participatory Sciences in Portland to meet other researchers who lead and guide collaborative research projects. Speaking today in the opening session is Scott Loarie, executive director of iNaturalist, alongside Carrie Seltzer (head of engagement) and Alison Young (director of outreach programs). iNaturalist is an online social network of over 3 million people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature, supporting over 6 thousand peer reviewed scholarly articles.

iNaturalist started seventeen years ago as a Master’s student project, and Scott tells us the iNaturalist has grown into one of the largest citizen science projects in the world. The project broke 8 million observations per month this spring (it varies seasonally, since most users are in the northern hemisphere), and they have identified 1/4th of all species. The platform took off during 2024. Since iNaturalist grows with each season, “it’s a slog” to grow – getting here has taken 17 years.

Focus on the critical challenge

Scott reminds us that it’s important to identify a simple, clear niche and mission, especially since there are always people who want you to go in different directions. For iNaturalist, the goal is to identify and name the world’s species. Scott tells us that the world is expected to lose 1 in 3 species by the end of the century, and to do that, we need to know what they are.

Make participating easy and fun

I’m a scientist, says Scott. We like complicated, grueling, and not fun things. Especially in this day and age, when there are so many things competing for attention, nobody is going to participate if it’s not fun. We spend a lot of time making it easy. Contributing to iNaturalist takes a lot of work. Someone needs to go out, take a photo of a living thing, the AI will then identify the thing, and try to make sense of it. That requires a lot of time and effort, which is why it needs to be fun, Scott says. For many iNaturalist users, they participate for the fun of discovering something unique and groundbreaking.

Make it social

One of the great features of citizen science, Scott tells us, is to bring people together. iNaturalist has taken lessons from athletics and other community activities. For example, the City Nature Challenge is the largest annual census of life on earth. Hundreds of cities around the world do an annual competition to get people to go out and collectively monitor up to 1 in 40 the world’s species just on one day.

Build a new kind of scientific instrument and make it open

Scott reminds us that many of the great scientific discoveries have enabled scientists to see things that no one could see before. By making all their data open, iNaturalist can focus on making it possible for people to collect and contribute data. Then scientists can figure out how to work with the resulting data, without the iNaturalist team having to hire scientists to work with it. Scott tells us about many ways that scientists have worked with iNaturalist data, including recent work on:

iNaturalist doesn’t orchestrate any of this research. They just make the data available.

Crowdsource solutions, not just science

Scientific institutions are under attack. The theory of change for a lot of crowdsourced work is that you crowdsource data, it goes into a scientist, who publishes a paper, and then puts it in front of a policymaker. Now that science is under attack, we can’t always be confident that scientists will get funded or that policymakers will even listen to them. 

Scott tells us that iNaturalist is hoping to do more work to directly support their communities to organize for change. He tells us stories of iNaturalist users who are ripping out invasive species and planting indigenous ones. In another case, scientists got fed up documenting all the newts that were crushed on the road in Petaluma California to organize efforts to protect amphibians crossing the road.

Scott ends by reminding us that citizen science is magical: it gives people an experience that’s fun and interesting, provides scientists with data that advances knowledge, and also organizes people for change.

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be publishing from CAPS 2025 organized by the Association for the Advancement of Participatory Science. I’ll also post a round-up with an index of the posts after the conference.