Dataset Card: iNaturalist — Citizen-Science Observations API

Status: draft, awaiting maintainer review. Endpoint, rate-limit, and coordinate-handling details checked against iNaturalist documentation on 2026-06-11. This source carries elevated ethics requirements because of sensitive-taxa coordinate handling.

What it is

iNaturalist is a global citizen-science platform where people record species observations with photos and community identifications. It is a rich source of recent, geographically broad occurrence data — and a place the public can be invited to contribute, making it the natural companion to field missions and observation guides.

Access

Field	Value
Provider	iNaturalist (a joint initiative; observations contributed by the public)
Docs	API reference, recommended practices
API base	https://api.inaturalist.org/v1 (the faster v1 API with consistent response formats)
Auth	None for public reads. OAuth required for writes and to access one's own private/obscured coordinates.
Rate limits	Aim for ~1 request/second and ≤60 requests/minute (hard cap ~100/min), and ≤10,000 requests/day. Excess returns HTTP 429. Cache aggressively.
Formats	JSON

License and reuse

Licensing is per observation — each observer chooses (e.g. CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-NC) or no license (all rights reserved). Filter by license and honor it per record; never assume a blanket license. Many records are CC-BY-NC, which restricts commercial reuse.

Fields

Observation id, taxon (with community ID), observed-on date, geoprivacy/coordinate fields, place, quality grade (use research-grade for data work), photos, and license.

Limitations and ethics

• Obscured coordinates are load-bearing. iNaturalist automatically obscures locations for taxa flagged sensitive (e.g. many threatened species). The public API returns generalized coordinates for these; precise coordinates require the observer's own authenticated access. Never attempt to de-obscure, infer, or republish precise locations of obscured taxa. This is both an iNaturalist rule and a Blue Life Commons ETHICS.md rule.
• Identification quality varies; prefer research-grade and treat IDs as community consensus, not authority.
• Effort bias toward populated, accessible, photogenic places.

How it's used in the commons

occurrence source for bay and reef guardians and citizen-science prompts in field missions. The platform to which observation guides direct contributors. Connector spec: integrations/inaturalist.md in the Ocean Intelligence System.