Talk:INaturalist

Talk

Discussion for: INaturalist • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

INaturalist is about iNaturalist: the nonprofit organisation, the observation platform it runs and the rules by which an observation becomes research grade and passes to GBIF. It also gives what the platform holds for Cannabis.

Sourcing

iNaturalist's history, terms of use, quality grades, licences and export to GBIF come from its own pages and help articles. The Cannabis counts come from iNaturalist's observation search and GBIF's occurrence search and carry their date. The two studies in the research section are cited for what their authors did with iNaturalist records. Discuss attribution, independent sourcing and any claim that has lost its attribution here.

Discussion

Counts

The counts are those of 13 November 2026 and change daily as observations are added, identified and relicensed. The iNaturalist figure of 19,697 takes in every grade; the website's default search shows only verifiable observations (research grade and "needs ID"), 14,720 on that day. GBIF's 10,061 records come from the weekly export of observations created up to 2 November 2026. On 13 November iNaturalist itself held 10,098 research-grade Cannabis observations under the three licences GBIF takes.

Wild and cultivated

iNaturalist counts as wild the descendants of planted plants and plants spreading on their own beyond a garden, so a research-grade Cannabis observation may show an escape from cultivation or a plant of a long-established stand. The platform's distinction is not the botanical one between feral, ruderal and wild populations. Halpin-McCormick and colleagues (2025) judged the photographs again for signs of human intervention and kept 302 of 416.

Data licence

Each observer sets the licence of each observation. CC BY-NC applies unless the observer changes it. The infobox therefore states that the licence varies. The GBIF dataset formed by the weekly export carries one licence, CC BY-NC 4.0, the most restrictive of the three it takes in.

Locations

On 13 November 2026 iNaturalist placed no automatic restriction on the locations of Cannabis observations: the genus has no conservation status that obscures them. An observation's location is public unless its observer obscured it (797 observations) or made it private (416).