Ken-ichi Ueda , a Japanese biologist and web developer based in California (United States), decided to found in 2007 a digital platform for lovers of the natural world, together with Nate Agrin and Jessica Klineun, a couple of colleagues from the University of Berkeley .
As a result of this collaboration, the iNaturalist app was born : the app for nature lovers that allows you to recognize any wild species.
Collaboration 2.0
In its almost 10 years of life, iNaturalist has grown a lot: it already has 24,000 active users each month, 127,000 observers and has been mentioned in more than 30 scientific publications. As Scott Loarie explains:
Our mission is to use technology to connect people to nature while generating data for science. Many use it because they want to record what they see and provide information for scientific research. Others use it to identify what they are seeing. We hope that instant gratification will make more people want to commit to collaborating.
Thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, its inventors have managed to turn it into a kind of "Shazam (app to recognize songs) of animals" , an application that allows you to recognize and identify the species you come across on the way. At the moment, iNaturalist has a website , an application for Android and another for iPhone.