When Whitney Matson first moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2017, she set out to learn more about the region’s plants. Six years later, she had learned enough to write a pine tree identification guide.
Matson did not take any classes. Nor did she work in a natural resource field. She did most of her learning through a web platform called iNaturalist.
“OK, I’ve got to learn new plants now,” she recalled saying after moving to the Jackson area. “And then I thought: ‘maybe there’s an app for that.’”
iNaturalist is a free platform where users can upload “observations” consisting of photos of any living thing and add them to a global biodiversity database where other users and an in-app algorithm help identify what they have seen. Greater Yellowstone is home to a bustling iNaturalist community where nearly 21,000 users have uploaded more than 365,000 observations. While these users vary from tourists to lifelong locals, they all benefit from the resources such as plant guides created by the iNaturalist community, Matson said.
Now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, iNaturalist first launched in 2008 as a master’s project by three University of California-Berkeley students. It’s one of a number of “citizen science” apps that crowdsource the documentation and identification of nature. Over the years, iNaturalist users have helped discover new species and track the spread of invasive species.
After downloading the app, Matson quickly developed the habit of pulling out her phone and snapping photos of interesting birds and plants she found on the trail and in town. Sometimes it’s the urge to observe a particular wildflower in bloom that gets her out of the house, she said. But it can be anything nature provides. “If I see something that really excites me, most of the people who have hiked with me know that we’re stopping and we’re gonna be paying attention to this,” she said.
Other iNaturalist users would help her identify the things she uploaded, and eventually she remembered the names of more and more things she saw. That led her to wonder how scientists identified plants. “I spent some time learning about basic plant anatomy and learning about certain groups,” she said. “At one point I said: ‘Man, I’d really like to know how to identify trees in the pine family.”
Matson read about pines online, collected images of their defining characteristics, then turned everything she learned into an online guide. It was educational, she said. “I was hoping that if I put it out there, people would also come and say: ‘Actually, that’s wrong.’”
One user made a small correction, and two others thanked her for her work. Now Matson’s guide is available online for anyone to use free of charge.
After eight years on iNaturalist, Matson has more than 5,600 observations of plants, animals and fungi in Greater Yellowstone: more than any other user. Despite her experience, she does not consider herself an expert. To her, that title belongs to users like Matt Lavin, a retired professor of plant sciences at Montana State University in Bozeman. His observations typically include a description of the plant and the characteristics that differentiate it from its relatives.
“When I teach a course in northern Yellowstone, I’ll try to get all the stuff I tell them on iNaturalist so they have future access to it,” Lavin said.
One valuable feature about iNaturalist and citizen science as a whole is that everyone can contribute, according to Hilary Turner, research biologist at the Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, Wyoming and regular iNaturalist user. “Even if you yourself don’t understand [what you’re seeing], someone who sees it on the internet might be able to understand it and interpret it for you,” she said. “I think that’s one of the coolest things about iNaturalist and the community of people that use it.”
Most of the app’s users in Greater Yellowstone, even the regulars, don’t meet in person or communicate with each other regularly, Matson says. “[But] I think there is a sense of camaraderie that comes with knowing that somebody is a regular user,” she said.
Turner believes that citizen science helps people care about the natural world. Just recently, iNaturalist helped her become fascinated with a type of insect called a robber fly that resembles a horse fly but with a long tail like a dragonfly. They are also known as assassin flies because they snatch other insects from the air, inject them with organ-dissolving enzymes, then slurp up their nutrients through a straw-like mouth, according to the Mississippi Entomological Museum. “A robber fly killing a bee would be the equivalent of us killing a deer with our mouth and eating it,” Turner said.
One night, Turner was uploading photos to iNaturalist and learned that an insect she thought was a bee was actually a robber fly disguised as a bee. “I didn’t know that a robber fly could ever look like that and I thought it was the most amazing thing ever,” she said.
Matson says the app has also revealed the beauty in the details. “When I’m out in nature, I don’t just see a green sea of trees,” she said. “I see spruces. I see Douglas firs. I see the lichens growing on them.” Like Turner, she has also been fascinated by unassuming insects.
In 2022, she spent a day in Yellowstone with her sister looking for large, charismatic mammals. They were lounging under a juniper tree in Mammoth Hot Springs when a dancing bug the size of a pencil tip fell on her.“I of course put up my phone, took some pictures of it and put it on iNaturalist,” Matson said. It turned out that the diminutive insect belonged to a genus of spittle bugs that had only been observed in Yellowstone twice before, she learned. “I think that what we see sometimes around the parks is that people are going through big animal bingo,” she said. “[But] there is just such value in appreciating and being delighted by whatever it is that you happen to see.”
