Article by Emily Anthes: “In the spring of 2019, a nature photographer hiking in the mountains of northern China snapped an image of an unusual insect: a fly that appeared to be disguised as a bumblebee, down to its fuzzy black-and-yellow stripes.
The photographer uploaded the image to iNaturalist, a citizen science platform, where it attracted the attention of an entomologist. The following year, the entomologist published a paper describing the bumblebee mimic as a new species, now known as the mountain ghost stiletto fly.
It’s a testament to the power of citizen science — and it’s not an isolated occurrence, according to a new study, which documents how scientists are harnessing iNaturalist data. Since iNaturalist was founded in 2008, observations submitted to the platform have been incorporated into more than 5,000 peer-reviewed papers, with references exploding in recent years, the scientists found. More than 1,400 such articles were published in 2022 alone — 10 times as many as just five years earlier and a publication rate of nearly four studies per day.
The data has helped scientists identify new species, track the spread of invasive organisms, pinpoint critical habitats, predict the effects of climate change and explore animal behavior, among other things.
“iNaturalist is really pervasive throughout the biodiversity research,” said Corey Callaghan, an ecologist at the University of Florida and an author of the paper, which was published in BioScience on Monday. “It is fundamentally shaping the way that scientists think about research and think about designing studies and think about answering questions about biodiversity.”
iNaturalist users submit photos or audio recordings of the plants and animals they observe, along with the date, time and location. Anyone in the iNaturalist community can suggest an identification for the organism in the observation. If two-thirds of these suggestions agree, and the submission passes the platform’s data quality review, the observation is classified as “research grade,” and sent to a global biodiversity database available to scientists…(More)”.
