What is iNaturalist?

The goal of iNaturalist Canada is to connect Canadians to nature while learning about the natural world and at the same time generating valuable biodiversity data.

iNaturalist Canada is led by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF) along with Parks Canada, NatureServe Canada and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), which collectively make up the iNaturalist Canada Steering Committee. The platform is managed by the steering committee in collaboration with iNaturalist.org which is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.

It Takes A Community: iNaturalist wouldn't be possible without all the members of our amazing community. These include anyone who's ever added an observation or helped with an identification, site curators, who manage our taxonomy and try to keep iNaturalist a fun, civil place to hang out, and all the volunteers at Crowdin who have helped translate the site and apps to allow for a fully bilingual platform. iNaturalist couldn’t exist without many, many wonderful open-source projects, open datasets, and public APIs, this includes anyone who has ever written code or filed a bug for an open-source project.

Communication:

Explore use of social media to engage the community.

• Introduce iNaturalist to the community and encourage people to get outdoors, explore, observe nature, share observations, have fun, and stay safe. And of course, to aways respect wildlife.
• Highlight biodiversity in and around the Halifax Harbour with focus on Dartmouth.

Content development:

Help expand the iNat community and help improve/enhance existing content.

• Introduce people to iNaturalist.ca and to encourage participate in the global City Nature Challenge (April 29 – May 2, 2022).
• Prepare people to participate in future events designed to highlight biodiversity.
• Review existing content and suggest activities to improve content.

Suggest ways to engage the community – adapt existing content and/or design new products:

• Promote activities suitable for people of all ages/skill levels.
• Compose blog articles.
• Create Facebook posts. Twitter? Instagram? Tiktok?
• Enhance existing content on web pages – add links, suggest photogalleries, and provide info on how to share observations that are normally simply posted to a personal or group FB page.
• Many groups have historically asked the public to ‘contact us if you see this species’. ‘Develop’ a package with info on how to add iNat option.
• Many people post ‘What is this’ or ‘Need help with ID’ to various FB groups. ‘Develop’ a package with info on how to add iNat option.
• Review/revise/adapt existing iNaturalist resources

Engage other university students

• Explore campus and upload observations to iNaturalist. Identify ‘hotspots’.
• set up Zoom meetings ‘Lunch & Learn/discuss/identify’
• Set up iNat Discord channel for university students
• encourage researchers to share observations associated with their projects
• Choose a research species group each week and encourage people to get out and find observations – and of course upload older photos associated with older datasets/projects/thesis.
• Contact alumni and ask if they have photos (of species from known location and date) that they can share? ‘Data Rescue’!
• Highlight the fact that iNat is global and in 40+ languages
• Join the translation team and help translate in another language
• Challenge other universities.

Engage local groups

• Friends of… Conservation, watershed, and stewardship groups
• Touch tanks, museums
• Hikers, dog walkers, …
• Schools, youth groups

Promote/design Activities

• City Nature Challenge
• Bioblitzes
• Beach cleanups
• Easy to advanced: youth to experts (taxonomists, photographers, …)
• BINGO!, scavenger hunts
• Data quests and Challenges

Promote local area

• Highlight trails, parks, and/or historical sites
• Urban
• Provincial
• Parks Canada
• How to access areas
• bus routes and easy access
• do not trespass!
• Leave no trace