A key component of the GuardIAS project involves leveraging iNaturalist, a nonprofit platform with over 260 million biodiversity records that engages over nearly 300,000 active users (as of July 2025).
iNaturalist allows users to quickly and easily upload their field observations. Users can then receive species suggestions from iNaturalist’s integrated AI system and/or by other community members. Once an observation meets certain basic criteria and is taxonomically verified by the community, it is shared with open-access repositories such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). These observations then become available to researchers, including ones studying invasive alien species (IAS).
Data harnessed from iNaturalist are incredibly important in the study and monitoring of IAS. They offer a scale of information that is often unachievable through conventional research methods, particularly in terms of geographic reach, cost-efficiency and continuous monitoring without spatial or temporal restrictions. This wealth of data supports research across the entire invasion timeline: from past events (e.g. first IAS detections, patterns of spread), to present monitoring (real-time surveillance), and future planning (informed IAS management and prevention strategies).
Thus, through our project, “Aquatic Invasive Alien Species Occuring in Europe” on iNaturalist, we aim to:
- Improve AI training by increasing the number of IAS records on iNaturalist
- Enhance detection accuracy through expert validation of observations
- Expand the spatial and temporal scale of IAS monitoring across Europe through contributions from citizen scietists
- Increase public awareness of IAS through community events and active engagement
Faster and more accurate IAS identification will facilitate efforts of GuardIAS to detect, monitor and manage IAS in Europe. We thus invite researchers and citizen scientists alike for their participation and contributions to this project.
Link to the iNaturalist project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/aquatic-invasive-alien-species-occuring-in-europe
