How we prepare an EIA: a real report, page by page30 pages of an environmental impact study built on the platform, with a voice that walks you through them.Browse the reportEvery verified iNaturalist observation from 2000 to 27 September 2026: 156 million observations of 431,656 species, made by about 1.6 million people.
52% of verified observations are North American and 28% European; the United States alone accounts for 40%. Africa and South America, home to a large part of the planet's species, together stay under 7%. The map shows where people look at nature, not where nature is richest: it is the limit of all biodiversity data collected by citizens (Hughes et al., Ecography 2021).
Open on the map →Verified observations were 311,000 in 2010, 1.1 million in 2015, 11.1 million in 2020 and 27.7 million in 2025: ninety times 2010. Growth was fastest between 2016 and 2020, 50 to 75% more every year; in 2025 it is still 20%. As of 27 September 2026 they are already 23 million.
Open on the map →The United States has about 79,000 observed species, Australia 61,600, Brazil 42,400, Mexico 40,900, South Africa 37,400. The number of species grows with a country's nature but also with the number of people observing it: in many tropical regions a good share of species has not yet entered the map.
Open on the map →39% of observations are of plants, 24% of insects and 21% of birds; fungi, reptiles, mammals, spiders, molluscs, amphibians and fish share the rest. Observers record what they see and photograph most easily, which is why small or nocturnal groups are under-represented (Di Cecco et al., BioScience 2021).
Open on the map →Italy has 2.3 million verified observations of about 26,800 species, made by about 39,000 people: the 12th country in the world for observations. In 2015 there were 16,000 in a year, in 2025 almost 400,000.
Open on the map →April to July hold almost half of the year's observations (48% in 2021-2025): the season when plants flower, insects fly and birds migrate in the northern hemisphere, where most observers are. In January the share falls to 4%.
Open on the map →Each hexagon sums iNaturalist's research-grade observations: a photo or a sound, a date and a place, with an identification at species level agreed by the community. Subspecies count as their species. It measures where and how much people observe nature: an empty hexagon is not a place without species, it is a place where nobody recorded them.
The iNaturalist open dataset on the AWS Registry of Open Data, snapshot of 27 September 2026: the observations accompanied by images under Creative Commons or CC0 licences, updated every month. Observations whose photos are all rights reserved are not in it, so the numbers are a part, a very large one, of iNaturalist. Observations with a position less precise than 10 km are left out; for threatened species iNaturalist publishes blurred coordinates, which at close zoom can fall in a neighbouring hexagon.
Observations are aggregated on the H3 hexagonal grid (about 12,400 km² per cell at world scale, 1,770 and 250 km² as you zoom in) and shown as observations per 1,000 km² per year over the selected period. The second layer counts the distinct species ever observed in the cell since 2000, estimated within about 2%: it grows with the size of the cell, so compare it at the same zoom.
iNaturalist gives no country: each cell takes the Natural Earth country its centre falls in, or the nearest within 25 km for coasts and islands. Overseas territories count with their country (French Guiana with France, for instance).
Frequently asked questions
In iNaturalist's open dataset, from 2000 to 27 September 2026, verified observations cover 431,656 distinct species, out of 156 million observations made by about 1.6 million people.
80% come from North America (52%) and Europe (28%); the United States alone accounts for 40%. Africa and South America together stay under 7%, Asia and Oceania are around 6-7% each.
Plants (39% of observations), insects (24%) and birds (21%). Fungi, reptiles, mammals, spiders, molluscs, amphibians and fish together make up the remaining 16%.
About 26,800 species, in 2.3 million verified observations made by about 39,000 people. In 2025 observations were almost 400,000.
From iNaturalist's open dataset (snapshot of 27 September 2026): research-grade observations with openly licensed images, aggregated by XNatura on H3 hexagonal cells.
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