February 2023

As an alternative to the group meeting session due to take place in January we held a ‘drop in by appointment session’.  The aim was to allow people to chat to myself and a colleague about iNaturalistUK, the iNaturalist platform generally or anything you might want assistance with relating to using iNaturalist.

Thank you to those people who took part. It was great to speak to you and hear about the work you are doing including supporting other recorders to share observations.

The session took place on Wednesday 01 February

If you were unable to make this time and date, please do still get in touch and we can arrange an alternative time.

Following the session, a summary of the ideas will be shared and where appropriate feedback sent to iNaturalist development team.

 

We intend to hold a group session again in March ahead of the City Nature Challenge and the plan is to focus on species identification within iNaturalistUK including the process and use of annotations. If you would like to be involved as a speaker or have hints and tips you would like to share, please do get in touch.

 

If you have any ideas for future iNaturalistUK User Group meetings, or want to speak about your project, scheme, or have any general ideas for discussion, please do let me know.

General Updates

Confirm you email address – Email addresses for all iNaturalist accounts must now be confirmed – please see this blog post for more information on the background for this change. You may also want to check the iNaturalistUK blog post on some quick tips before clicking the confirmation link.

Year in Review 2022 – Every year in December, iNaturalist produces annual usage stats – the Year in Review. Since December 2021 these have also been available for iNaturalistUK. To view your personal Year in Review follow the link shown from the iNaturalist or iNaturalistUK Year in Review page or https://uk.inaturalist.org/stats/2022/you To view stats from other years use the URL https://uk.inaturalist.org/stats/[YEAR]/[USERNAME]. For the first time it is also available for Seek. Simply log into the app and click the link.

Updates to the Mobile Apps – Work is still progressing to make significant changes to both the Android and iOS versions of the app so they will be both the same. Currently the Android app has more features. Development is taking longer than originally anticipated and the upgrade will not be released before May 2023.

Curators – generally iNaturalist are keen to increase the number of active curators. Find out more about their role and what’s involved. If you are interested and want to speak to an existing curator please feel free to contact them via iNaturalistUK or contact Giselle at inaturalistuk@nbn.org.uk . You can see the current iNaturalistUK affiliated curators on the People page (Scroll down to the bottom) or the full list of curators on the main iNaturalist website. Curators play an important role within the iNaturalist community. Some may wish to concentrate on editing taxa but there is also a need for users to help develop and enhance the community.

iNatForum – If you haven’t already found this resource do take the time to explore. As well as being a place to make feature requests and report bugs it also contains tutorials and a section for educators.

Future meetings

If you have ideas or thoughts on discussion topics for future group meetings, please do let me know. We want this group to be of benefit to users so do share your ideas.

The next meeting is likely to take place in March 2023. We are considering holding this one at the slightly later time of between 5.30 and 7.00 pm. If you have any thoughts or comments on this proposal, or anything else related to the User Group please do let us know at inaturalistuk@nbn.org.uk

Getting Involved

If you wish to be part of the iNaturalistUK User Group or simply want to be kept updated on the meetings please sign up to our mailing list.