Our Observation of the Week is this trio of Phallus rubrovolvatus stinkhorn mushrooms (アカダマキヌガサタケ in Japanese), seen in Japan by @alinehorikawa!

Born and raised in Brazil, Aline Horikawa and her husband moved to Japan in 2017, and they were walking along Kyoto’s Kamo River last month when they decided to check out a nearby park and botanical garden. 

Walking around and observing so many plants, we noticed a bamboo grove, so we decided to stop and look at what could be there. To our surprise, there were some fungi and we especially noticed the Phallus rubrovolvatus. It was such an incredible surprise that I couldn't believe I was looking at a species like this. I only knew about it from photos on the internet and seeing it in person was wonderful.

Stinkhorn fungal fruiting bodies are pretty fantastical in appearance, with their well, phallic, stalks and lacy veils, but many of us would notice them first by odor. Their spores are contained in a thick, fragrant substance called gleba, and the smell attracts insects. The insects crawl around in the gleba, which sticks to their bodies and later falls off after they’ve moved away, thereby spreading the spores to new areas. 

I reached out to @masaki_hamaguchi, who provided the first Phallus rubrovolvatus identification to this observation, and asked him for more information about this species. He wrote,

Phallus rubrovolvatus has a reddish volva as its name suggests, which is a notable feature of this species. The veil is often shorter and the reticulation coarser than in complex Phallus indusiatus and its allies in Asia.

There may be several other characteristics, but in this observation, the red volva was visible and the form was typical of P. rubrovolvatus, so I judged it to be this species.

Masaki also linked me to this description of the species, which, according to Google Translate, notes that the gleba of this species has a “fruity” smell. 

Aline (above), says 

I have been interested in nature since I was a child in Brazil. I grew up in the countryside, in my grandparents’ house, with lots of plants and animals. I have always loved birds. I also liked playing in places with lots of greenery. I remember that my grandparents’ house had a waterfall and it was one of my favorite places. You could see fish swimming and occasionally I could see wild animals, snakes, lizards and many mammals, and that was impressive for a child.

In 2013 she started birdwatching (“the best choice of my life”), and her interests in nature have broadened well beyond just avians. 

Years later, I graduated as an Environmental Technician. I have done work that I am very proud of, with environmental preservation and fauna surveys in Brazil. In a region, the main job was to make sure that residents could live with wild animals in a more friendly way. Knowledge changes the world, you improve the quality of life of people and animals.

After moving to Japan she continued observing the “wonderful” flora and fauna there, finding new and exciting things every time she goes out. Through a friend, she discovered iNat in 2019. At first she just used it as a place for ID help, but as she got to know iNaturalist better she realized she could do much more with it. 

I started organizing my records to maintain a database for the region where I live, which is in Shiga Prefecture.The way I see the natural world has improved a lot. Knowledge opens doors and helps with environmental preservation.

I have met many researchers and can contribute important photos and information for serious conservation research, especially with birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. This makes me very happy and I can only do it because of iNaturalist. All life is important and this allows me to look at an insect or mammal in the same way.

(Photo of Aline by Gerson Horikawa. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- you noticed the fly hanging out by the mushrooms, right?

- Masaki not only loves mushrooms, he’s also a magician! Check out his YouTube channel for videos on both subjects. 

- take a look at the most-faved observations of stinkhorns on iNat!

We hope you enjoy our June News Highlights! If you missed last month’s highlights, you can catch up here. This month, we’re leading with Urban Ecology stories that show how cities are using iNaturalist to reimagine their relationship with wildlife.

Urban Ecology

A. In California, @cesarestien and colleagues from UC Berkeley used iNaturalist to measure the impact of discriminatory practices on urban biodiversity. They published their findings in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences.

In Australia, researchers used iNaturalist data to understand how people are interacting with informal green spaces in urban environments. Another study used iNaturalist data to understand how far people travel to parks across the United States.

In Italy, @deborabarbato and colleagues described how their Siena BiodiverCity project has prompted urban planners to actively incorporate biodiversity and nature into city development.

Species Discoveries

B. Lost species lists can guide efforts to rediscover species.

With the help of iNaturalist data, @chrysoptera and colleagues published a list of 126 lost birds not seen in the last decade (+9 that have been recently found).

You can compare this list with whats been seen on iNaturalist this decade here which includes this spectacular Yellow-crested Helmetshrike found by @cypseloides last December (note that there are some iNat/eBird vs BirdLife taxonomic discrepancies).

Range Extensions

C. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, @connorrfad documented the first-ever Queen butterfly. Check out this video where @willkuhn from Discover Life in America recounts the discovery.

D. In Canada, @oridgen10's fly observation was among the first records in the country.

E. In Ecuador, @davidweaver’s observation from the Río Palenque Research Center helped confirm a range extension of the Littoral Glassfrog

Invasive Species

F. In the United States, there have been so many stories tracking the Joro spider invasion in June that iNaturalist was mentioned in both Washington Post and the New York Times on the same day. @diego_h’s observation shows a Joro eating a native two-lined spittlebug.

G. In Europe, @mdv used iNaturalist data to understand shifts in the ecological niches of invading mantids outside their native ranges.

H. In Ecuador, @mario_yanez_munoz, @feranolis, @stefannycuadrado, @keyko_cruz, and @lamador used iNaturalist data to understand how Brown anoles are able to invade Guayaquil.

Conservation

iNaturalist is a powerful tool for detecting declines in species (see examples like this monitoring study and this rarity study on Brazilian amphibians and reptiles). Building on this, the following two examples from Canada show communities using iNaturalist to advocate for the protection of habitat to protect rare species:

I. In British Columbia, local groups are using iNaturalist to call for an emergency order to stop an open-pit mine on one of just two known sites of an endangered fern observed here by @eva7.

J. In Alberta, the Save Nose Creek project is using iNaturalist to advocate for the creation of a provincial park in the lands surrounding Nose Creek.

Connectivity

In addition to protecting land, communities are using iNaturalist to improve and restore land. Often this involves increasing connectivity between protected areas to decrease fragmentation. These stories highlight how iNaturalist is being used to increase connectivity by combatting road mortality.

K. In Costa Rica, @carolina_pinto and colleagues are using iNaturalist to identify wildlife crossing mitigation sites.

L. In Canada, researchers used Musk Turtle observations like this one by @pricklybriar to understand road mortality risks as they move between wetlands.

M. In Oregon, the Department of Fish and Wildlife partnered with the Oregon Zoo to launch the Roadkills of Oregon project on iNaturalist to understand where road kills like this gopher snake observed by @peterolsoy are occurring.

iEcology

Scientists are using images contained within iNaturalist images to advance ecology:

N. Across the United States, @moore-evo-eco and colleagues used iNaturalist images to distinguish dragonflies with ornamented wings such as this common whitetail and found that ornamented species are faring better in human-modified landscapes. This research supports sexual selection theories suggesting that signals like wing ornaments can reduce difficulties finding mates in rapidly changing environments.

O. In North America, researchers used iNaturalist images like this one by @louiseinva to compare the interaction between Mexican grass carrying wasps and host flowers across its range.

P. In Italy, researchers used iNaturalist images such as this one by @laura1544 to study spatial distribution of distinct viper phenotypes

AI Naturalist

Q In Germany, @teja6 and colleagues used iNaturalist images to train models to automatically identify individual species from drone imagery of canopies.

Bioblitzes and Events

R. In California, don't miss this story about how the Snapshot Cal Coast 2024 survey led by @rebeccafay and colleagues succeeded in detecting one individual of the critically endangered sunflower sea star that has dramatically declined in recent years.

Also this month, there were many great iNaturalist events for National Pollinator Week. We loved this tutorial by @jdo77 on how to create a pollinator project on iNaturalist.

iNaturalist’s Education Impact

S. Campus bioblitzes like the University of Southern Malaysia Campus Nature Challenge which documented this clouded monitor by @rusidah are a great way to teach conservation and environmental awareness.

There were also many examples of courses and student projects using iNaturalist this month.

iNatters in the News

T. @alan_rockefeller and @mandiequark’s mycology work and use of iNaturalist was featured in the New York Times this month.

U. In Trinadad and Tobago, @akilahstewart published an article on her experience joining the Inter-island Bioblitz

V. In England, @ed-in-sidmouth published an article on how churchyards and cemeteries around Sidmouth can be sanctuaries for nature.

W. In Australia, this story highlighted @joelirwin’s many contributions to the Griffith University Gold Coast Campus bioblitz.

Thank you to everyone who participated on iNaturalist this June! You can become an iNaturalist supporter by clicking the link below:

Donate to iNaturalist

We are excited to announce the launch of our Vision Language Demo, developed in collaboration with our long-time partners at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Edinburgh, the University College London and MIT, with generous support from Microsoft AI for Earth. This demo enables you to search a snapshot of 10 million iNaturalist photos using text queries. For instance, typing in "a bird eating fruit" will return matching photos ranked by their relevance to your query.

By clicking the “View these observations in Identify” button at the bottom, you can open these photos in the iNaturalist Identify tool where you can add the observations to projects or add observation fields or annotations. We are excited to learn if you find this tool useful for finding and organizing observations representing different life stages (“a caterpillar”), flowering phenology (“a cluster of red berries on a leafy green branch”), captive/cultivated (“a houseplant in a pot”) etc. into projects and with annotations.

Unlike the iNaturalist Computer Vision Model and Geomodel which we train ourselves off of iNaturalist observations, we did not train this model nor is it trained on iNaturalist data. This demo is built off a freely available Vision Language Model that was trained on millions of captioned images not necessarily relating to the natural world. This means that it knows about other things in addition to living organisms (e.g. "a bird perched on a car") but it also means that it currently has biases and may return inappropriate or offensive results that we don’t fully understand. Please keep that in mind when using it.

You can help us and our research collaborators understand how this model (or other Vision Language Models models we may explore or build) perform by clicking on the “Help us Improve” button. By marking the photos on the page that are relevant or not relevant to your search (e.g. "Mating dragonflies") and clicking submit we will be able to compare the performance of different Vision Language Models at this image retrieval task.

We built this demo to better understand the potential of Vision Language Models to help the community organize, explore, and explain the information contained within iNaturalist images. Building this demo has helped us understand the opportunities and challenges associated with this new technology. For example, while these models sometimes demonstrate a surprising ability to describe what is happening in images at a coarse level, they also fail to grasp more complex, finer concepts such as species names.

Two exciting possible future avenues are:

1. Helping to explore and organize iNaturalist images

iNaturalist data have been used in more than 4,900 scientific publications. While many scientific applications stem from qualities of the data that are already easy to filter (species, location, date etc.), an increasing number of studies are leveraging “secondary data” contained within the images themselves ranging from species interactions, to animal behavior, to phenotypic patterns revealed in the images such as color. Here are some examples of recent published studies that resulted from pulling patterns out of iNaturalist images:

Conservation: Recovery plans for the endangered Red-bellied Macaw were premised on the belief that the parrot relies on fruits from a single species of palm for food. Silva and colleagues examined iNaturalist images of this parrot eating fruit and found that it has a much more diverse diet than previously thought.

Climate Change: To reveal how plants are adapting to climate change, Funkano and colleagues examined iNaturalist images of wood sorrels from around the world and found that leaf color is evolving to become redder in urban heat islands.

Animal Behavior: Jagiello and colleagues examined thousands of iNaturalist images of hermit crabs and found that they are increasingly utilizing lighter weight plastic trash in lieu of shells. This study reveals how certain animals are able alter their behavior to take advantage of the Anthropocene and resulting impacts on the ecosystem.

Evolution: Most mammals are thought to have brown eyes. Tabin and Chiasson examined iNaturalist images to test this. They found an exception in the cat branch of the family tree where eye-color is extremely variable and explored the role that sexual selection plays. This paper was covered by Science magazine.

Mimicry: Muñoz-Amezcua and colleagues used computer vision models to examine iNaturalist images and found that many more insects mimic spiders than previously thought. This study reveals how in addition to more efficiently surfacing patterns that the human eye can detect (e.g. cats with blue eyes), vision models can also detect patterns that have gone undetected (e.g. moths that resemble jumping spiders).

We’re very excited to explore whether Vision Language Models can make it explore and organize the rich data contained within iNaturalist images.

2. Explaining Computer Vision species identifications

As anyone using tools such as ChatGPT knows, multimodal Vision Language Models can help explain images in a way that complements more traditional Computer Vision systems. The iNaturalist Computer Vision AI does a great job of telling us what species is in a photo, but it doesn’t do a great job of explaining why that species is suggested.

Offering explanations is something the identifier community does quite well by sharing expertise in text remarks (e.g. “This is Striped Rocket Frog and not Rainforest Rocket Frog because the white stripe extends from the eye to above the leg rather than to the groin.”). We’re interested in building Vision Language Models trained on iNaturalist images and remarks that will help iNautralist users understand why the Computer Vision AI is suggesting certain species and how to distinguish between them.

Deeply integrating Vision Language Models into iNaturalist is still far off and will require new funding opportunities and lots of product and engineering work. But we are very excited to share this small milestone on that journey. Please share your feedback on this exciting new demo!

Our Observation of the Week is this Tatra Chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica, Kamzík vrchovský tatranský in Slovak), seen in Slovakia by @terana!

“This photo was taken one summer morning in 2013 near the mountain hut where I worked as a student,” says Linda Majdanová, who graduated with a degree in Ecology and Biodiversity Protection. 

When I had free time, I wandered around the surrounding peaks and watched chamois for hours. They are unusually hardy animals. I have many wonderful experiences with them, it is amazing to watch chamois cubs playing together on the remaining snow. Today, meeting a chamois during a hike in the Tatras is not so exceptional, as their numbers, decimated by hunting in the past, have increased thanks to protection. But it is always a pleasant experience to meet this iconic animal, which is undoubtedly a symbol of the Tatras.

A subspecies of the northern chamois, Tatras chamois are herbivorous goat-like mammals which inhabit the Tatras mountains in Slovakia and Poland. As Linda says, they were commonly hunted, with only a few hundred remaining by the end of the 20th century. With conservation work, over a thousand are counted pretty consistently in the mountains now, see the census numbers on its Wikipedia page.

Linda (above) remembers always loving nature, and says 

We lived near the forest and I went on secret trips to nature almost every day and brought home all kinds of bugs, frogs or mushrooms. I was always extremely curious and wanted not only to see, but also to know what I found around me, so instead of fairy tales and children's books, I read educational encyclopedias.

She’s now in the middle of her doctoral studies at the Department of Forest Ecology of the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague where she specializes in wood-inhabiting fungi in primary and old-growth forests - the topic of her dissertation.

I started contributing to iNaturalist only recently, so I gradually upload older recordings in addition to current observations. I was quite surprised that there are many experts who are able to identify different groups of organisms, which is amazing. Since I spend a lot of my working and free time in the field, whenever I see something interesting or something I don't know, I tend to take a picture of it. And now I know that my observations will not fall into the dust somewhere in a file but will contribute to the knowledge of the world's biota. I also like to look at species distribution maps and find out what lives/grows in different parts of the world.

(Photo of Linda by Vladimír Ruček.)

- this video has some excellent chamois footage.

Each time you post an observation of a plant, additional data can be collected for the study of phenology—the timing of events like flowers, fruits, and leaf color change.

Now, you can annotate all observations of vascular plants to indicate evidence of leaf buds, leaves, seasonal color change, or no leaves.

This is what the options look like on an observation of a vascular plant:

Also, we’ve simplified the annotations related to flowers, fruits, and seeds. The appropriate option(s) should be selected based on the evidence provided in the photos.

If you hover over the options with your cursor, you will see the definition. You can also review the definitions in our documentation.

On taxon pages, by default you see a chart of overall seasonality. Take a look at the Japanese Maple. If you add a place filter in the upper right to restrict it to Japan, you can see that it is most observed in April and November.

If you click on “Flowers and Fruits” and hover over the points on the chart, you can see that April has observations in all four categories: flower buds, flowers, fruits or seeds, and no flowers, fruits or seeds. Note: the chart settings offer the option to “Hide ‘No Annotation’” which was selected here.

If you click on “Leaves” and hover over the points on the chart, you can see that November has many observations with colored leaves.

It is hard to strike the balance of broad applicability and useful specificity for almost 400,000 species of plants. Although many species do not fit nicely into these categories, the goal is to provide a useful starting place for most species of plants. We worked closely with other phenology programs (USA National Phenology Network and Budburst) and phenology researchers to develop and revise these terms.

iNaturalist observations have already been used for many studies of plant phenology, such as the impact of climate change on the wood anemone, spatial and temporal gradients in flowering phenology across Europe, and anomalous Yucca blooms across southwestern North America. Increasingly, researchers want to access more data by using machine learning to label fruits, flowers, and leaves based on a set of training data. With 8 million annotated and verifiable angiosperm observations (out of 71.8 million angiosperm observations), iNaturalist is a massive and growing source of data to understand plant phenology. Now with the ability to add leaf annotations, we can make 76 million vascular plant observations more useful, too.

These updates were supported by a collaborative grant from the US National Science Foundation to advance plant phenology research through the creation of Phenobase. Phenobase will aggregate plant phenology data from many sources using the Plant Phenology Ontology to maximize data interoperability, in addition to using machine learning to infer phenological stages from photos. The Phenobase collaboration involves the USA National Phenology Network, University of Arizona, Louisiana State University, University of Florida, and the Chicago Botanic Garden.

To learn more about adding annotations, you can review the definitions in and a tutorial about using the Identify tool to add annotations quickly using keyboard shortcuts. Now you can see on your profile how many observations you have annotated. Thank you to everyone who annotates observations!

Our Observation of the Week is this Anoplocnemis curvipes bug, seen in Kenya by @ndanganga!

“I became interested in nature at a young age (around 8 years) mostly due to spending time out in the fields taking care of my family's herd of cattle,” says Kariuki Ndang'ang'a, who grew up in Kenya. 

With other boys I adventured a lot into the then almost intact countryside which had a lot of wild berries to eat, trees to climb, as well as mammals, birds and other animals to describe and hear stories about. Eventually I chose a “Wildlife Management” university degree and since then I've not stopped. I am particularly interested in ornithology/ study and conservation of birds, and have written a lot about my bird research. However for the last almost 20 years I have been working in a bird conservation NGO on conservation projects, programmes and leadership. Despite my bird specialisation, I still find myself looking at other forms of fauna and flora.

Lately, Kariuki tells me, he’s become interested in photographing odd plants and insects. “Not that I can identify them,” he explains, “but there is fun in placing a picture in inaturalist and getting suggestions of the taxa's identity from other people.”

One morning, Kariuki was walking around his fruit and vegetable garden,

appreciating how green it has suddenly become following recent rains, and suddenly among the weeds I noticed this strange bug!! As expected I took a picture on my phone and loaded it on iNaturalist, only to realise hours later that it had been chosen as the Observation of the Day. I couldn't help but share a screen shot of the X post on my WhatsApp update.

Anoplocnemis curvipes is a species in the leaf-footed bug family (Coreidae), most of which suck sap from plants. Quite a few species, like this one, have enlarged femurs, and many have “leaf-like” growths on the tibia of their hind legs. Anoplocnemis curvipes is known as a pest of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), a common crop in Africa. 

Kariuki (above) has been on iNat for a few years and tells me he uses it

for quickly identifying and learning about interesting plants and animals (especially invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles) I bump into during my day to day activities. iNaturalist has changed the way I interact/see the natural world by increasing my curiosity for anything I see around me.

(Photo of Karikuki by George Ndung'u)

- take a look at the amazing diversity and beauty of the coreids!

- this Southern African frogleg leaf beetle also has some enlarged femurs!

We're excited to share our May News Highlights! If you missed last month’s highlights, you can catch up here.

Species Discoveries

A. In Ecuador, zoology student @abigaildt's photo of a butterfly caught the attention of @rhopal, @cadeou, @kwillmott and colleagues resulting in the description of a new species. You can read news coverage here and a Spanish version of our video here.

Distributions and Range Extensions

iNaturalist is helping scientists understand species distributions and how they are changing at in real time. Here are three examples from this month:

B. In Thailand, this paper documents a major range extension of the Himalayan giant honey bee with the help of this observation by @wuttipon.

C. In Honduras, this paper documents range extensions of the Golden Silk Spider within Honduras thanks to observations like this one by @oliverkomar.

D. In far northern Canada, this story recounts @anthcolangelo’s out of range encounter with a Golden-belted bumble bee.

Invasive Species and Climate Change Science

E. In Italy, @benjamin189 posted the first occurrence of the invasive Asian needle ant in Italy. @lynxrufa and colleagues were able to visit the site and collect specimens as recounted in their recent paper.

F. In Canada, this story explains why climate change is suspected as playing a role of the arrival of this invasive catfish documented by @ecota55.

G. In Massachusetts, this Boston Globe story describes work by @karro_frost and @jformanorth to keep invasive pears at bay like this one observed by @maurabarry.

Conservation Science

H. This great article in Nature Africa describes how the iNaturalist and Wikipedia communities are helping scale biodiversity information in Africa and highlights work by @marojejy, @daverichardson, @tonyrebelo, @possumpete and many others.

I. In California, this exciting new study by @joeycurti3, @mtingley and colleagues that uses iNaturalist data to understand how urbanization impacts species is getting media coverage in places like Science Friday, Science Daily, and Popular Science.

J. In Canada, this story describes @asper’s discovery of an endangered snail thought to have disappeared from most of Canada.

Phenology

iNaturalist is useful for understanding phenology which is the study of the timing of natural history events.

K. In Hong Kong, a paper by @johnt77 (seen here describing the project) and colleagues describes their Hong Kong Jellyfish project and how it is helping understand the timing of when jellyfish like this one observed by @lily_yeung are found in the water.

L. In Canada, this paper by @stephanieaverygomm and colleagues examined the strengths and weaknesses of using their iNaturalist project and observations like this one by @cara112 to detect a mass bird mortality event caused by avian flu.

M. There continue to be many articles about iNaturalist and the cicada emergence underway in parts of the United States. We're highlighting this one because of its focus on using iNaturalist to record cicada sounds such as this observation by @sam_hartzler. And if you’ve had your fill of stories about iNaturalist and cicadas from the United States, here’s one from Australia!

iEcology

In the emerging field of iEcology or Imageomics, we’re highlighting three stories of scientists finding interesting ecological patterns in iNaturalist photographs.

N. In the United States, this study used iNaturalist images showing mites on beetles like this one by @bertharris to better understand this interaction.

O. Similarly, this study in Ecuador used this observation by @bosquenublado to understand beetles that live in bee nests and use the bees themselves as taxis.

P. Also in Ecuador, this study used observations like this one by @fundacionmadreyumboec to understand how house wrens are incorporating human materials like plastic into their nests.

Bioblitzes and Events

Q. There were many articles on last month’s City Nature Challenge including this great Washington Post article on why you should participate that featured this relaxed toad observed by @ripley_k.

R. In Mexico, the 2024 Border Bioblitz got a lot of news coverage including this article quoting @sulavanderplank, @jrebman and others. This photo by Tamayo Vazquez shows @jorgehvaldez’s with an endangered red coachwhip and the border wall in the background. You can read more about the Border Bioblitz here.

S. In Jamaica, don’t miss this great video summarizing the recent Holywell Bioblitz posted by and featuring @damionwhyte.

iNaturalist and Human Health

T. iNaturalist is useful for better understanding species like bananas that are important to humanity. This paper by @chris971 and colleagues from CIRAD in France leveraged their iNaturalist project to better understand this important food source.

On the topic of growing plants, there were a pair of articles in the Washington Post this month that mention how iNaturalist can help keep invasive plants and also pests out of your garden.

iNaturalist’s Education Impact

With the school year wrapping up we saw iNaturalist being used in many student projects this month ranging from this study in Chennai, India featuring observations from @jomijose and others to this study by @emma2311 in California in which she coordinated collecting physical samples of hydras from iNaturalist observers to better understand their evolution and distribution.

Following up on their herping guide last month, @coreytcallaghan and colleagues at the University of Florida have released an excellent guide to mothing using iNaturalist.

iNatters in the News

U. In Massachusetts, @natemarchessault wrote a wonderful article describing how he uses iNaturalist to stay connected to nature.

V. In California, we loved this video where @charlotteseid explains why tuna crabs are being seen north of their usual range in San Diego.

W. In New Zealand, this article recounts how this photo won @frankashwood the “most inspiring invertebrate” award during the Ōtautahi/Christchurch City Nature Challenge last month.

Lastly, don’t miss this great podcast in which @jodyallair and @birdizlife discuss how iNaturalist can spark an interest in nature beyond birding.

Thank you to everyone who participated on iNaturalist this May! You can become an iNaturalist supporter by clicking the link below:

Donate to iNaturalist

Our Observation of the Week is this Stachys lavandulifolia hedgenettle plant, seen in Georgia by @​​crocusadamii!

Like many of us, Beka Sukhitashvili was fascinated by nature as a child but then turned away from it as they grew. 

As a child, I lived in a village for several years, which greatly influenced my outlook. Flowers have always fascinated me. As a teenager, I became completely immersed in urban life and had less and less time to observe the environment. Everything changed in 2020 when the pandemic hit my country. In Tbilisi, near my house, is Turtle Lake, where I started walking every weekend. At first it was just walking and relaxing, but gradually I became interested in the surrounding plants. I remember very well that the first flower I was interested in finding out the name of was Crocus speciosus. It remains my favorite flower to this day, and the genus is my favorite in general.

Now, as an amateur naturalist, my main goal is to study species and determine their exact Latin names, as well as take high-quality photos. I want to be able to record as many species as possible in the area of Tskneti/Turtle Lake/Mtatsminda and for that I created a project on iNaturalist.

Last month, Beka was hiking in the area and came across the plant you see above.

When I go to observe plants, I don't have a predetermined goal. While walking, I try to find the most beautiful flowering plant and try to take a high-quality photo with a camera, then process it and upload it to iNaturalist.

I noticed the Stachys on the side of Mtatsminda, in rocky and sandy places. I had never seen it before and was happy to add another species to my collection. I am a little dissatisfied with the quality of the photos, but in the future, since I already know the place where this flower grows, I will try to take better photos.

I was initially drawn to Beka’s observation because, in addition to being beautiful, it’s strikingly different from the Stachys species we have in California. Turns out that Stachys (a genus in the Mint family) has over 300 species and is distributed throughout much of the world, so it’s quite diverse. Stachys lavandulifolia is found natively in the Caucasus Mountains, in addition to Iraq and Iran, and as the Missouri Botanical Garden says, “the flowers are a show-stopper.”

Beka (above), says he found iNaturalist this year. 

I like the fact that I can easily search for information about a particular species and see in which region of Georgia it was observed. For example, Crocus vallicola is not mentioned in Georgian plant guides, but I came across it on iNaturalist and I was very happy.

I also like that I can compare my observations with those of others and thus identify the species. The site is multi-functional, which makes it attractive. I also like to help identify others’ observations.

(Photo of Beka by Beka’s brother Saba Sukhitashvili,. Some quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

- take a look at some of the most-faved Stachys observations on iNat!

We released a new computer vision model today. It has 88,517 taxa up from 86,861. This new model (v2.13) was trained on data exported on March 31, 2024.

Here's a graph of the models release schedule since early 2022 (segments extend from data export date to model release date) and how the number of species included in each model has increased over time.

Our goal is to try to attain the same accuracy or improve it while adding more taxa to the model. The graph below shows model accuracy estimates using 1,000 random Research Grade observations in each group not seen during training time. The paired bars below compare average accuracy of model 2.12 with the new model 2.13. Each bar shows the accuracy from Computer Vision alone (dark green) and Computer Vision + Geo (green). Overall the average accuracy of 2.13 is 88.2% (statistically the same as 2.12 at 88.1% - as described here we probably expect ~2% variance all other things being equal among experiments).

Here is a sample of new species added to v2.13:

• Plantae
• Actinopterygii
• Other Animalia
• Mollusca
• Aves
• Reptilia
• Insecta
• Mammalia
• Amphibia
• Fungi
• Chromista
• Arachnida
• Protozoa

The iNaturalist team is growing! We are pleased to introduce three new members of the iNaturalist team:

Michelle F. Vryn

Head of Development

Michelle, with over 15 years of nonprofit experience, has led both fundraising and communications teams. Her expertise spans major gifts, digital fundraising, and institutional giving at organizations focused on endangered species, disaster relief, and nature education. Before joining iNaturalist, she worked at OneStar and Bat Conservation International. Michelle is a mentor to young nonprofit professionals and serves on the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Global board of directors.

Thea Skaff

Director of Digital Fundraising and Engagement

Thea is a nonprofit leader with experience in fundraising, marketing, analytics, and tech, driving engagement and growth for mission-driven organizations. She was recently a senior member of the Online Fundraising team at the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia) where she planned and led fundraising campaigns in an international environment including A/B testing on large global data sets. When not working, Thea is often outside biking or hiking with her husband and two boys.

Jane Weeden

Accounting Associate

Jane joins iNaturalist's accounting department, bringing with her experience gained from the dot com era, the startup world, and as a small business owner. She holds an MBA from University of Texas at San Antonio and is enthusiastic about promoting the iNaturalist message. Outside of work, you'll find Jane leading walks in the parks around San Antonio as a Master Naturalist. She’s an avid photographer and enjoys honing her skills documenting the biodiversity around us.

Please join us in welcoming them!