What is iNaturalist?
iNaturalist is a community of citizen scientists, like you! Every observation can contribute to biodiversity science, from the rarest butterfly to the most common backyard weed. We share your findings with scientific data repositories to help scientists find and use your data. All you have to do is observe.
Why use iNaturalist?
Milwaukee Riverkeeper uses iNaturalist for two major projects. Our water quality monitors photograph the macroinvertebrates collected during surveys in the field, our team then helps verify your identification.
The second way we use iNaturalist is to report observations of native mussels. Wisconsin has 51 native species of mussels. Sadly, mussels are a threatened group of species and there is not a lot known about their population in the Milwaukee River Basin. If you find a mussel, either alive or an empty shell, you can snap a quick photo. Like with macroinvertebrates, you can upload your mussel photos to iNaturalist and the community can help you identify them. This information will be shared with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to help them better understand the distribution of these threatened group of species.