Cultivating Bioliteracy, Biodiscovery, Data Literacy, and Ecological Monitoring in Undergraduate Courses with iNaturalist

Abstract

iNaturalist is a large and growing open-source online platform connecting a global community of users to the natural world and to each other. iNaturalist makes it simple for anyone to share observations, get identifications, and make identifications of any species. We demonstrate how iNaturalist can connect students to nature in undergraduate courses, simultaneously contributing to biodiversity knowledge. Our three case studies use iNaturalist to improve student bioliteracy (awareness and knowledge of biodiversity), to engage them in biodiscovery (discovering undocumented biodiversity occurrences, behaviors, and interactions), to introduce students to systematic ecological sampling (documenting biodiversity patterns and trends), and to improve their data literacy (by depositing and accessing open biodiversity data and by performing analyses). Included are examples from a variety of contexts—a required general science course, introductory courses for science majors, and more specialized electives. We discuss the rationale for iNaturalist inclusion, how iNaturalist inspires students and complements courses, and outputs of our students’ iNaturalist use. Introducing students to tools such as iNaturalist helps build the next generation of bioliterate and biocurious citizens and scientists, fluent in open collaborative research and learning. With wider uptake and coordination, iNaturalist has potential to connect undergraduate ecology courses to form a distributed virtual global biodiversity observatory.

Keywords

• citizen science
• higher education
• inaturalist
• natural history
• technology
• biodiversity crisis