A new one to me! It’s a nice-looking moth!
And it looks to be less common than many other plant and animal species! (Screen captures from 20May2022.)
For some context on those numbers (from iNaturalist’s About page):
iNaturalist.org began as the Master’s final project of Ken-ichi Ueda, Nate Agrin, and Jessica Kline at UC Berkeley’s School of Information in 2008. Nate and Ken-ichi continued working on the site after graduation, with some additional help from Sean McGregor. Ken-ichi began collaborating with Scott Loarie in 2011, when they organized as iNaturalist, LLC and began expanding the site through numerous collaborations. In 2014 iNaturalist became an initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and a joint initiative with National Geographic Society in 2017. Internationally, iNaturalist is supported by several different organizations through the iNaturalist Network.
In the “iNaturalist” entry on Wikipedia, they say:
Since 2012, the number of participants and observations has roughly doubled each year.[14] In 2014, iNaturalist reached 1 million observations[15] and as of December 2021 there were 99 million observations.[6]
And here is how they have grown in terms of species observations:
In a blog post on iNaturalist, entitled “We’ve passed 100,000,000 verifiable observations on iNaturalist!,” they write:
If you made 1,000 observations a day, every day, it would take you 274 years to generate 100 million observations. This milestone shows what people can do by working together. The iNaturalist dataset is something we’ve all made together, but it’s larger than any one of us. We hope everyone is as proud of this accomplishment as we are. Together, the iNaturalist community has created a unique window into life on Earth and hundreds of thousands of species with whom we share the planet. Thank you!
We know that even more potential for iNaturalist lies ahead. To fulfill our mission of connecting people to nature and advancing science and conservation, we’re working on a strategy to reach 100 million naturalists by 2030. This requires investing in technology improvements, so we’re now searching for two new software engineers to join the iNat team. Please spread the word to help us find great candidates.
They also have some pretty cool graphs there! 🙂