iNaturalist NZ is an online platform where people can go to log plant and animal species they spy in Aotearoa's great outdoors.
It has an ever-growing community of over 42,000, who collectively have made almost 1.5 million observations to date.There have been 100 million observations made worldwide.
Christchurch based housing Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon
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iNaturalist is an online platform where if you see a plant, animal or insect you don't know, you can take a photo and get it identified. Or you can just take a photo of a species and post it and it attaches to a point on the map, and then other people looking for sightings can find it.
With this much data collected, some are saying iNaturalist should be used when it comes to things like site development and resource consent, ensuring we aren't putting nature in harm’s way when we build.
iNaturalist research associate Colin Meur tells Afternoons the website is improving the phone app to make it easier to use.
For Meur the scientific worth of the website is obvious, allowing him or others to map where species are located and the spacial density.
“Both as a scientist and as a naturalist, I'm interested in learning and knowing about what the species are and where they occur, and when their flowering times are, or their lifecycle stages. Also, seeing the kind of distribution patterns of species.
“It's important to know that there's much more functionality available on the website, if anyone wants to really explore into these things - land owners and people can learn about what's growing locally, what animals are occurring. And also, it's building up a bit of an historical record now to so that you can see how things have been present or absent in the past and how those distributions have changed over time.
“So, the database is growing all the time and together with you know, some of the International databases that you can layer into it quite easily. It's probably the most comprehensive database of species and natural history available to us."
The use of iNatural in determining site development and resource consents, he says, is an obvious extension of its capabilities.
“That’s because fundamentally they’re based on what’s occured there, both good and bad, both native species, exotic species, but also biosecurity pest species," he says.
“So, you can accumulate all of that kind of information for a particular site or a particular district or an area. It might be relevant to be able to see what's on a particular parcel of land, but also in the surrounding district, which might guide for example, restoration or offsetting, any mitigation of effects that you may wish to do.”
It also offers the environmental experts carrying out a report on what they think is happening around a site and what might be impacted hard evidence that particular species exist in that area.