iNaturalist

Hi everybody, today's post is about a website related to my carreer (Forestry engineering). The one that I choose is iNaturalist (https://inaturalist.mma.gob.cl/) wich have an app for smartphones too.

This website is very interesting. Here you can create it an account and upload different records (in photos and/or audios) about plants, birds, mammals, reptiles, fungis, insects, lichens, mosses, etc. The idea is that you can provide the identification (in example, the specie), ubication and date of the register, and other people of the community will confirm or deny your record. However, if you don't know the species identification, you also can upload it and the community will help you identify it. This is a very usefull tool, because when two or more persons confirm your identification, the registry achieves research grade, which means that it is truthful and can be used eventually.

iNaturalist works as a social network, therefore, you can follow other people's profiles and see their records. In addition, it has a section for identifying unknown or unresearched records, which is quite fun and allows you to get better at recognizing species.

Another of iNaturalist's tools is the explore function. This allows you to search for records in a specific place by locating it on the map. In this way, you can search for a hill, for example, and see what species have been recorded there. 

One of my favorite functions is to create or join a project. A project unifies all the records that exist for a given location (for example, Cerro Renca). In this way, a cadastre of the species of the place is carried out, which contributes to the knowledge of the place and its conservation.

In the next image you can see the "Parque Mapocho El Trebal" project, the same one I published some time ago. 

As you can see 212 species have already been found in the sector and we continue to find more with each visit!

The functions of iNaturalist are many, so I will not be able to explain all of them. In fact, I don't know them all yet hahahaha.

I really like iNaturalist because it allows to generate and share knowledge, achieving mutual learning thanks to its collaborative nature. For this reason, I visit it at least once a day since I joined.

Finally, I invite you to join this platform and upload all the records you have! And don't forget to follow me hahaha 

Thank you for read me <3 <3