{"id":246072,"date":"2026-04-01T02:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T02:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/246072\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T02:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T02:44:13","slug":"a-berkeley-project-that-became-a-crucial-scientific-tool-for-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/246072\/","title":{"rendered":"A Berkeley project that became a crucial scientific tool for the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

A woman walks a quiet South Bay road near Los Gatos<\/a> at night, headlamp sweeping the asphalt. Every few feet, she stops \u2014 not for traffic but for bodies. Dozens of them. Newts<\/a>, splattered by cars during their seasonal migration from the slopes of the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve to the Lexington Reservoir. She crouches down, places a tiny ruler down on the road next to a body and photographs it. Then, she walks over to the next one and repeats the process.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

She uploads all these images to an app. Years later, the data will force officials to redesign the road.<\/p>\n

The app she used is iNaturalist<\/a>, and this is what it can look like in action.<\/p>\n

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An infrastructure for nature<\/p>\n

In March 2008, 18 years ago this month,\u00a0iNaturalist was founded<\/a> by Ken-ichi Ueda, Nate Agrin and Jessica Kline, graduate students at UC Berkeley<\/a>\u2019s School of Information \u2014 it was their final master\u2019s project. The app can be used on a smartphone or desktop, and it allows users to take photos of plants, animals and fungi and upload them to be identified. The date, time and location are also logged, making it easy for anyone to contribute to research.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A user of iNaturalist logging observations in China.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Scott Loarie, used with permission<\/p>\n

Scott Loarie, iNaturalist\u2019s executive director, joined the organization in 2010 and oversees a team of 20, up from just eight a few years ago. They make sure the platform continues to operate seamlessly for the 4 million community members who use it across the globe.<\/p>\n

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The app\u2019s growth has been steady: \u201ciNaturalist never had one of those overnight success stories,\u201d said Loarie during a recent phone call.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, its impact has been significant.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago, iNaturalist hit a major milestone when it passed over 300 million verifiable observations. Data collected on the app has appeared in more than 7,000 scientific publications. On its birthday weekend, users logged over 80,000 observations. About 300,000 groups rely on the app to keep scientific projects organized.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The result is something that doesn\u2019t fit neatly into any category.<\/p>\n

Sure, it\u2019s an app, but it\u2019s also a volunteer network, a scientific database, a community forum \u2014 and, in Loarie\u2019s words, a public solution to an authority gap. \u201cYou bring together a bunch of people, you know, stitched together with technology tools, under this nonprofit organization,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then you get this really important infrastructure that is something much more akin to \u2026 what a government would provide.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Users<\/p>\n

Users of\u00a0iNaturalist logging observations in San Bernardino County, Calif.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Tony Iwane, used with permission<\/p>\n

He says being a nonprofit is the whole point. Technology is a powerful tool, but it can also go sideways and get dysfunctional. \u201cWe can see all that come out of social networks and AI,\u201d he said. The nonprofit aspect keeps iNaturalist anchored to a mission and\u00a0keeps it working for the community rather than a bottom line.<\/p>\n

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Changing how people see the world<\/p>\n

Merav Vonshak is an entomologist, but iNaturalist changed the way she moves through the natural world. \u201cUsing iNaturalist, it kind of opened my eyes to look at everything,\u201d she said during a phone call. \u201cEverything becomes interesting.\u201d She describes herself as \u201cslightly addicted \u2026 in a good way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vonshak, a former postdoc at Stanford, was introduced to the app there, but it didn\u2019t stick right away. It wasn\u2019t until she took a naturalist program with Grassroots Ecology<\/a> in 2017, where the app was a requirement, that she got hooked.<\/p>\n

For her, the app has a way of turning old experiences into new data. Vonshak described going back through photos from a trip to Australia she took more than a decade ago. \u201cI opened the folder, and I realized that I never actually opened it after that trip, because there was no need for that.\u201d With the app, she has a chance to not only relive the experience but amplify it. Suddenly, there was a reason to look through the images again: to identify, to share, to add to the database.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/p>\n

A user of iNaturalist logging observations in Nevada County, Calif.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Tony Iwane, used with permission<\/p>\n

The scope of the platform makes all of it possible. Unlike birding apps like eBird<\/a> or many plant ID tools, iNaturalist covers it all.<\/p>\n

The people behind the nature app\u00a0<\/p>\n

None of this works without the people behind it, ranging from staff members to platform users. \u201cSo much of the impact of iNaturalist is from this incredible global community that\u2019s willing to participate and share all of their expertise,\u201d Loarie said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Beyond the observers, the identifiers keep things going.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt all relies on this thankless, kind of behind-the-curtain work that all these experts are pouring into the site from around the world,\u201d Loarie said.<\/p>\n

Alison Young, the group\u2019s director of outreach programs, came over to iNaturalist after years of building community science programs at the California Academy of Sciences<\/a>. Young calls it the nicest place on the internet. (That\u2019s not just her sentiment. The New York Times said it<\/a>, too, she proudly noted.)<\/p>\n

In addition to generosity, Young said the community also polices itself. When artificial intelligence-generated images or web-scraped photos began appearing on the platform more frequently this year, it was volunteer curators, not staff, who caught most of them first, according to Young.<\/p>\n

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\"Users<\/p>\n

Users of\u00a0iNaturalist logging observations in China.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Scott Loarie, used with permission<\/p>\n

People\u2019s engagement on the app varies. Some are observers, uploading photos of whatever caught their eye. Some realize they can help identify other people\u2019s observations. Others, like Vonshak, go further: organizing bioblitzes, launching regional challenges and building entire research programs.<\/p>\n

Young\u2019s latest push has been nudging people further down the path.<\/p>\n

This past December, she ran iNaturalist\u2019s first-ever ID-a-thon<\/a>: a monthlong campaign to show casual observers that they could ID other people\u2019s submissions without expert training.<\/p>\n

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Where discoveries happen<\/p>\n

The geographic spread of where engagement takes off has surprised even the people running the platform.<\/p>\n

Texas Parks & Wildlife was one of the earliest institutional adopters, coming on board around 2012, Young said. Since then, the Texas community has shown up reliably, dominating the City Nature Challenge<\/a> year after year. More recently, a driven group of iNaturalist acolytes in India helped grow the number of cities taking part in the challenge from just a few to more than 200. \u201cThe groups that do the outreach about iNaturalist are really amazing,\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n

The discoveries that come from this effort can be startling. Vonshak described photographing what looked like an unremarkable bee near Coyote Valley a few years back and forgetting about it entirely.<\/p>\n

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Three years later, the observation was identified as the first of its species ever recorded on iNaturalist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bee, Centris california, an oil digger with no common name, is associated with a rare plant in southern Santa Clara Valley, Vonshak said. \u201cIt\u2019s not, like, in the middle of the jungle,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The next challenge is the jungle.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A user of iNaturalist logging observations in San Bernardino County, Calif.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Tony Iwane, used with permission<\/p>\n

The tropics \u2014 where the majority of the world\u2019s species live \u2014 is also where iNaturalist has the fewest participants. Attracting people\u2019s participation isn\u2019t just a growth goal for Loarie; it\u2019s something he views as a scientific necessity. The platform is monitoring about 500,000 of the world\u2019s species, which is about 1 in 4 of those we know about.<\/p>\n

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Loarie wants to get to half.<\/p>\n

Observation to action<\/p>\n

Back on that dark road near Los Gatos, the story of what iNaturalist helped make possible is still unfolding. It began with Anne Parsons, a Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District<\/a> trail patrol volunteer who noticed something wrong near the trailhead she was patrolling: newts, dead on the road during the seasonal migration. She started documenting their crushed bodies on iNaturalist because she was already active on the app.<\/p>\n

Then she came back. And kept coming back. Parsons surveyed the 4.2-mile road, divided in the two sections, at least once a week between November and April (the duration of the migration).<\/p>\n

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Vonshak eventually joined and now leads the Newt Patrol<\/a> group.<\/p>\n

Over five years of continuous surveying, the Newt Patrol recorded an average of 6,000 dead individuals per season. By Vonshak\u2019s estimate, that\u2019s the highest mortality rate of any amphibian species worldwide. \u201cYou could only see that because one person decided that, OK, this is important,\u201d Vonshak said. \u201cAnd the data is so strong that we just kept collecting \u2026 because you can\u2019t argue with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The road cannot be closed \u2014 it serves as an emergency bypass for Highway 17 \u2014 but the data proved to be persuasive in other ways. In January of this year, Midpen\u2019s board approved a $650,000 pilot \u201cNewt Passage\u201d project, which will include fencing and underground tunnels installed at the worst roadkill hot spots along Alma Bridge Road. Construction is expected to start in 2028,\u00a0according to KQED<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The crossing locations weren\u2019t determined by guesswork but by years of precise location data collected through the app. \u201cAnd this is all because of iNaturalist,\u201d Vonshak said. \u201cBecause it\u2019s not just a way to document and to, you know, create a database but also to create a community around it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That community-to-action pipeline is playing out on a larger scale, too. In California, iNaturalist data feeds into the state\u2019s 30×30 initiative<\/a>, an ambitious plan to protect 30% of California\u2019s lands and coastal waters by 2030. The data also goes to\u00a0the Global Biodiversity Information Facility<\/a>, where it\u2019s available to scientists worldwide.<\/p>\n

Loarie has a name for the sum of all this. \u201cThis is what I like to call actionable hope,\u201d he wrote in a recent message to supporters. \u201cIn this age of climate anxiety and biodiversity loss, you\u2019re helping iNaturalist turn anxiety into action, and action into agency.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A woman walks a quiet South Bay road near Los Gatos at night, headlamp sweeping the asphalt. Every…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":246073,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144,1693],"class_list":{"0":"post-246072","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-headlines","10":"tag-oakland-news","11":"tag-sfglocal"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}