February 16, 2022

12:00pm, PST 158 HH and Zoom

Carrie Seltzer
iNaturalist and California Academy of Sciences

" iNaturalist Data Adventures in Unlocking Natural History at Scale "

iNaturalist is a platform and social network where people can share observations of biodiversity and crowdsource identifications. By early 2022, the iNaturalist community of 2M people had already contributed almost 90M verifiable occurrence records representing over 340,000 species from every country in the world. The data that emerge from this collective effort allow anyone to explore the basic questions of what species have been found where and when via the iNaturalist interface, as well as more complex analyses via data exports.
Thanks to millions of identified photos, iNaturalist regularly trains a new computer vision model to give taxon suggestions based on an image and location. iNaturalist is just beginning to apply the same kinds of modeling to species distributions. Improvements to spatial modeling will enable better surfacing of novel observations for use cases like early invasive species detection. The presentation will also cover examples of ecological research by external groups that incorporate iNaturalist data in different ways, as well as recommended data access methods.

 

Seminar will be presented live, in-person, in

Hershey Hall, Room 158

Seminar will also be live-streamed via Zoom

Host: EEB Graduate Students