Making the most of your iNaturalist records

iNaturalist is a global wildlife recording website and app. It has continued to grow in popularity in recent years, particularly since it is easy to use for less experienced recorders. It has a helpful online community, and the website and app are engagingly designed with rich features.

In 2021, a collaboration between some of the UK’s wildlife recording organisations led to the launch of iNaturalistUK – a UK-focussed portal for the site and the start of closer ties to the UK wildlife recording network. Further information about this and what that means for iNaturalist users is available on the NBN website. Since that time there has been a number of positive actions to improve the flow of records from iNaturalist into the UK’s wildlife recording systems.

A growing number of iNaturalist users

Over the last five years there has considerable growth in the number of people submitting wildlife sightings on iNaturalist. You can see the latest stats for the UK in the 2025 annual review, with over 2.2m records added last year alone. Here in SW Scotland we have a similar tale. Just over 4,700 records were submitted to iNaturalist in 2021; last year, in 2025, that number reached just short of 17,000, covering 1781 different taxa recorded by over 1000 different observers. Approximately ⅔ of the records achieved ‘Research Grade’, meaning they had community agreement on the identification and were shared to the UK’s online wildlife recording system, via iRecord. Once on iRecord, the records are then available to be verified by local/national experts and are made available to share with National Recording Schemes and Societies and to local environmental records centres (LERCs) throughout the UK.

SWSEIC has a ‘project’ on iNaturalist to showcase the latest sightings and recording activity in SW Scotland. You can visit the page here: uk.inaturalist.org/projects/swseic-inaturalist. Anyone can see these records and summaries – there is no need to be an existing user.

Sharing iNaturalist records with SWSEIC and other organisations

Whilst iNaturalist offers a simple and easy to use interface for sharing wildlife sightings, it does have some drawbacks. It relies on records to have supporting evidence (usually in the form of photos) in order to reach ‘Research Grade’. Records without this evidence will not, in general, be shared more widely to UK recording organisations, and we all know how difficult it can be to get a recognisable photo of some wildlife species. Other platforms, such as BirdTrack and iRecord may be more suitable for more experienced recorders who wish to record sightings without providing photos for each one.

Also, the iNaturalist data entry forms do not enforce the same data standards as the UK system. This means that records acceptance by national recording schemes can be quite patchy. Records without location names, or missing proper recorder names, may not be accepted by some recording schemes or LERCs – the situation varies from area to area and from species group to species group. Joss Carr, from the Biological Recording Company, recently completed his Masters research project on this issue and there is a good online summary of the issues surrounding data flows in his YouTube presentation here.

It is worth noting that the default license on iNaturalist for sharing records is quite restrictive for LERCs. The Creative Commons ‘Attribution | Non-commercial’ (CC-BY-NC) restricts commercial use of records, and that means that LERCS cannot include the records in data searches for development planning where we may make a charge to commercial organisations to recover our time spent compiling and extracting the data. In 2025, only 14% of iNaturalist observers in SW Scotland shared their records under a flexible license allowing data  to be used for core SWSEIC work.

Making the most of your iNaturalist records

If you want your records to be used and integrated into the UKs national biological recording infrastructure, the following suggestions will help your data to be adopted more widely and flow more easily into the UK’s national recording infrastructure (iRecord > County Recorders & LERCS  >  National Recording Schemes & NBN Atlas)

1. Update the default license for your records – On iNaturalist, you can choose a specific license for your records – the default license means that records may not be usable for some of the work that LERCs such as SWSEIC do. If you plan to use iNaturalist and want your data to be used fully in research and local decision-making, SWSEIC would encourage you to set the license for your records (in the ‘content & display’ section of your account settings) to the ‘attribution’ license (CC-BY) or to ‘no copyright’ (CC0) so that records can be used fully by your local LERC.
2. Use your full name as your Display Name – if you are comfortable doing so. This is the information that is shared to iRecord with your record (part of the four W’s), and will allow verifiers to trust the records more easily.
3. Check the precision of the marker for your records – using the iNaturalist app, new records generate a location from the GPS signal on your phone. Make sure the pin for your record is correctly located where you saw it, and adjust it if necessary. This is very important of you are recording something after you saw it (e.g. at home after a walk) – the record should point to where you saw it, not your living room!
4. Give your records a Location Name – one which matches the name of pin location for the record. Names autogenerated by the iNaturalist gazateer are often extremely vague; where the pin and location name disagree, verifiers may question or reject records.
5. Become a member of the SWSEIC iNaturalist project –  If you are an iNaturalist user you can also become a member of the SWSEIC project. As well as supporting us, you will have the opportunity to allow SWSEIC access to more detailed information for any sensitive species/locations which might otherwise be blurred.
6. Affiliate your account – If you are an existing iNaturalist user, you can affiliate your account with iNaturalistUK via your account settings. You can also access the iNaturalist website via the UK portal link – uk.inaturalist.org – to see updates and announcements from iNaturalistUK on your dashboard.

And remember there is no need to post the same record/observation and photos to iRecord (or direct to SWSEIC) as well as to iNaturalist. If you follow the above advice your records will reach us, though it can take a few months to do so.

The iNaturalist community online is an active and knowledgeable one, and there are some keen and experienced UK recorders in the online forum. You can also find some more detailed tips for making the most of your records here and here.