Format: ORAL

Jess G. Gonzlez-Gallegos, J. Fernando Po-Len

Instituto Politécnico Nacional, CIIDIR Unidad Durango

iNaturalist is an online visual network allowing the interaction between citizens attracted by the natural world, and experts on different taxonomic groups, who would help them to identify the species documented by pictures linked to spatiotemporal data. The platform pursues to promote a connection between people and biodiversity, and to support biodiversity and conservation science. Mexico was one of the first countries to ascribe to this new way of socializing and collecting biodiversity data, under the lead of the Comisin Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO), which keeps promoting it. At first, there was some reluctancy from the Mexican scientific community on biodiversity studies, but progressively more researchers have gotten involved in the uploading and identification of observations; and it is becoming more common to find scientific papers benefited by iNaturalist data. The observations have helped to better document the distribution of some species with the addition of unknown localities, and their morphological variation with and increasing number of photographs, long forgotten species have been rediscovered, or even new ones have been named based on clues given by iNaturalist observations. Here we present a revision of the contributions of iNaturalist to the knowledge of the diversity of Lamiaceae family in western Mexico as a case study. A numerical analysis was performed on the comparison of richness patterns revealed in the study area based on two databases; the first downloaded from iNaturalist, and the other assembled from herbarium specimens of more than 20 herbaria. Although the patterns extracted from iNaturalist data are clearly biased in comparison to those obtained from herbarium specimens, the platform helped in adding additional localities and to detect previously unrecorded plants, or even new arrivals in terms of new naturalized species. Recommendations for the use and improvement of iNaturalist impact are also compiled.