Scott Loarie

We can start repairing this connection with the natural world.

That's the power of citizen science.

So I've seen this firsthand with a citizen science project that I lead, which is called iNaturalist.

So how does it work?

So you go outside, you take a picture of any living thing, and first the AI will identify it, but then you share it.

You share it with a global community of scientists and naturalists, and they'll help vet it and turn it into scientific data.

So this is data that's used by scientists to track species, to understand how ecosystems are changing, and even to describe new kinds of plants and animals.

So iNaturalist started as a master's project at UC Berkeley, and over the last 15 years, I've helped it grow into one of the world's largest citizen science projects.

So we now have millions of people around the world who are doing this, posting their photos, and this community has built this really amazing living, breathing atlas of the natural world.

We now have hundreds of millions of observations representing one in four of all species on the planet.

And these are ... Thanks.

These are data that are used by AI models, by land managers and by scientists in thousands of studies.

But remember, each one of these observations is an encounter between a regular, everyday person in the natural world.

And some of them are really great.

This is Glenda Walter.

She's a retiree in Australia, and she was out on a walk and she noticed this little mantis.

She took a picture of it.

It's an entirely new species of praying mantis.

So it was given the name Anemia Nat, which abbreviates to iNat.

iNat is the nickname for iNaturalist, in honor of this kind of collaboration between regular, everyday people and scientists.