There have recently been dozens of new reports of the invasive non-native Chinese mitten crab as they migrate downstream to waters of higher salinity in preparation to breed, sometimes travelling across land to reach their destination. Our furry friends have been appearing in back gardens and allotments across the country with one appearing outside a Sheffield pub and another spending the day at the Italian fountains in Kensington Gardens!

Identifiable by their brown furry, white tipped claws, the Chinese mitten crab is the only freshwater crab found in the UK and, on a more serious note, causes extensive damage to our river banks, modifying habitats and competing with native wildlife. They are classed as one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species and it is important that we monitor their distribution.

Thursday 14 December at 5 pm.

Register to Join. 

It's been an exciting year at iNaturalist — we became an independent nonprofit, our community surpassed 150 million observations and to cap it off, we're holding our first ever live, virtual event hosted by Carrie Seltzer, iNaturalist’s Head of Engagement. You're invited to join us to take a look back at 2023 and:

• Hear from iNaturalist's Executive Director Scott Loarie about the global Year in Review and how your iNaturalist observations are advancing science and conservation.
• Explore the personal Year in Review feature with our new board member Cat Chang, who is also an iNaturalist user with more than 43,000 observations of her own and 248,000 identifications for others on the platform.
• Learn how to generate and share your own personal iNaturalist Year in Review.
• Hear what's ahead for iNaturalist and how you can be involved.
• Submit questions for a Q&A with Carrie, Scott, and Cat.

You can view your personal Year in Review via the link on the iNaturalistUK Year in Review or use the URL https://uk.inaturalist.org/stats/2023/you.

The stats will be refreshed every every Sunday in December and on January 1st so there is still time to add any sightings or identifications.

Every year in December, iNaturalist produces annual usage stats - the Year in Review. Since December 2021 these have also been available for iNaturalistUK. Your 2023 activity will be available to view from 01 December 2023. To makes sure your stats include all your sightings this is a great time to review your observations and make any updates. This can include improving your identifications, adding those observations that are still sat on your camera or assisting others by a helping to ID species that you know. You can also take the opportunity to review your observation licence to allow your sighting to be of most benefit to the national recording schemes and local environmental records centres. (CC0 or CC-BY is ideal. Read more here.)

See last years results

iNaturalist Global 2022 Year in Review

iNaturalistUK 2022 Year in Review

To view your personal Year in Review follow the link shown from the iNaturalist or iNaturalistUK Year in Review page or https://uk.inaturalist.org/stats/2022/you

To view stats from other years use the URL https://uk.inaturalist.org/stats/[YEAR]/[USERNAME]

To view any previous year for iNaturalist use the URL https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/[YEAR] e.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2019

Following on from iNaturalist's announcement of becoming an independent non-profit organisation, co-directors Scott Loarie & Ken-ichi Ueda were interviewed on an American public radio station for an hour-long show talking about the origins, impacts, and aspirations of iNaturalist. You can hear the recording here. Alternatively it can be found on a podcast platform. For example listen on Google Podcasts. It's an interesting conversation and includes views of users. Worth a listen!

Impact of recording
Nature’s recovery depends on the collection of wildlife records – information about what species have been seen where and when - so that we can measure and see if our conservation actions are working or not. In the UK, the collection of these vital records predominantly relies on an incredible community of organisations and volunteers including users of iNaturalistUK

As an iNaturalistUK user your recording effort adds to the knowledge of this country’s biodiversity and which species are in particular danger - needing our urgent help and protection

EuroBioBlitz is a Europe-wide wildlife recording event taking place on the 29th and 30th of September 2023. Anyone across the continent can support ecological research by uploading photos of their local wildlife to the iNaturalist app.

How to take part:

You can take part as an individual, by simply uploading photos of your local wildlife that you see on the 29th and 30th of September 2023. Alternatively, you could go that one step further by organising a walk to help your local community, friends or colleagues to discover the wildlife that’s on their doorstep. To receive free information, guidance, and resources to help you along the way, head to www.bnhc.org.uk/eurobioblitz-2023 where the Natural History Consortium will be able to support you run your own mini event to record wildlife during EuroBioBlitz 2023. This could range from a short walk using iNaturalist to record the wildlife that you see around your workplace, to a full-day BioBlitz event with activities like pond-dipping and expert-led guided walks – you decide!

Resources for EuroBioBlitz are available in English, Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Swedish.

Join the EuroBioBlitz project page on iNaturalist

You can "join" the project page to get journal post updates, and to see records being added in real time across Europe during the event! Search for EuroBioBlitz2023 on the iNaturalist projects page, or click here to take you directly to the EuroBioBlitz 2023 project page.

Who is organising EuroBioBlitz 2023?

The #EuroBioBlitz2023 is organised by The Natural History Consortium (based in the West of England, UK) as part of INTERSECTIONS a collaborative initiative focused on supporting researchers across Europe. In partnership with Berlin School of Public Engagement and Open Science and the Global Science Show, supported by UKRI.

City Nature Challenge is an annual global wildlife-recording challenge where over 450 cities across the world will be trying to record as much wildlife as possible over four days at the end of April 2023. This year, City Nature Challenge takes place between Friday 28 April and Monday 1 May 2023. To make sure that the observations you spot are as useful as possible to conservation groups and researchers in the UK please take some time to review your iNaturalistUK settings

Confirm your email address - a must before July 1st, 2023. This applies even if you only use the app. Read more here.

Check the observation licence setting - To ensure that the UK recording community can make the best use of your records please consider changing the default licence assigned to your observations. You can read more about licences on this blog post, Licensed to Share!  You can edit licences for all observations at once or change one by one. Ideally, please change the observation licence to CC0 or CC-BY. You can assign a more restrictive licences to your photos.

Update your profile - if you have an expertise or a passion for a taxon or place why not let others know? On the website it's easy enough to update your profile and share your knowledge and interests. Introduce yourself!

Location, Location Location - read more about using pinned locations (useful if you regularly record in the same place) and geoprivacy on iNaturalist.  Where possible please use the open visibility setting by default.

Join the CNC Project near you - Take a look at the UK leaderboard to see which areas are taking part. By joining the project you will be able to easily view sightings through the app by clicking on the projects link. In addition if the project admins create any journal posts these will automatically appear in your news feed. If your city isn’t taking part yet – you could consider becoming an organiser for your city for future years! This will involved managing an inaturalist project page and encouraging people from your city to take part. Sign up to find out more about being an organiser for next year’s challenge.

Spot something you want to share? - Why not share in the comments below or on social media using #CNC23 #CityNatureChallenge #iNaturalistUK @citnatchallenge @BioBlitzUK

Important Update from the iNaturalist Developers:

Facebook is threatening to remove the ability to sign in to iNaturalist with a Facebook account on March 20. We're not sure if that will happen or not, but if you regularly sign in to iNaturalist with your Facebook account, please follow these steps to make sure you can sign in without Facebook (if you never sign in with Facebook you can ignore this):

1. Go to https://www.inaturalist.org/users/edit#profile
2. Change your password; you will be signed out after doing so
3. Go to https://www.inaturalist.org/loginand sign in with the password you just entered
4. Always sign in with your username and password in the future

If you have any problems, please email help@inaturalist.org (we will not reply to direct messages on iNat).

THE DETAILS
Facebook has increasingly stringent security requirements for applications that access data from their platform, which includes any application that supports signing in with a Facebook account. Most of these requirements are good ideas, but they can be difficult to implement, and only 2-3 people on our team are able to do so. Just assessing their requests and replying to them can take days. We are hoping to meet their requirements by the deadline, but you should take the steps above to ensure you are able to sign in to your iNat account no matter what. We are also not committed to supporting Facebook Login in the future, so it's doubly worth making sure you have a working password.

These are the attributes from Facebook that we store and why we store them:

• user ID (to keep track of whether you've signed in with Facebook before)
• name (to create your initial username)
• email address (to contact you and let you recover a forgotten password)
• profile image (to create your initial iNat profile image)

The Facebook user ID and email address are as private and secure as any other private data on iNat, and depending on your Facebook preferences, we may never have accessed anything other than your user ID.

You can learn more about Facebook’s data security requirements for developers at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/development/maintaining-data-access/data-protection-assessment.