Curing 'Plant Blindness' with iNaturalist
27 Feb 2021
“A traveler should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.”
-Charles Darwin
Dionaea muscipula / venus flytrap, observed by myself
iNaturalist is “an online social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe”. Users upload wildlife observations (usually photos but also audio and GIFs) and other users and AI tools help provide an identification. More info on getting started.
It’s an amazing resource that can reveal the unfamiliar in the familiar. For most of my life, I never really paid close attention to plants and they just kind of blurred together. But I wanted to learn how to identify plants, especially trees, and iNat made it very easy to cure my “plant blindness” . I started using iNat to catalog plants I’d see on my usual hikes in the nearby Croatan National Forest. Eventually I realized there was this whole world I was missing out on and got hooked. How could I not fall in love with plants when I was often walking among longleaf pines and finding carnivorous plants in pocosins ? This past spring I couldn’t wait to get out every weekend and see what new plants I could discover (plus, there wasn’t anything much better to do during a pandemic).
Since starting in 2020, I’ve identified ~250 types of plants and ~100 species of others organisms. And it’s not just identification, I’ve also picked up a web of knowledge covering ecology, evolution, etc. Anyways, I highly recommend anyone with even a little bit of curiosity to start using iNat and learn about the wildlife around them.