data source· draft
iNaturalist Species Observations
Esri feature service in ArcGIS Living Atlas that serves iNaturalist's research-grade observations worldwide, refreshed monthly, with hexagon summaries at small scales.
A hosted feature layer published by Esri in ArcGIS Living Atlas. It carries the verifiable and research-grade observations contributed through iNaturalist, each with its photos or audio, the observer's name and the local date and time, so that GIS users can map species records without downloading and converting the archive themselves. Esri credits iNaturalist as the data source.
The layer is built for fast visualisation rather than bulk analysis. Points are only drawn at scales larger than 1:144k; at smaller scales H3 hexagons summarise the twelve predominant taxon groups. Small subsets of around 100,000 observations can be copied out of the service; larger extracts are meant to come from iNaturalist's own site, its AWS S3 open-data extract or the GBIF archive, which is what the service is derived from.
Coverage is worldwide in WGS84, with a time extent from 1768 to the present and a monthly refresh. Use is under the Esri Master License Agreement. Esri's item record gives a publication date of 7 July 2026; an earlier beta layer, "iNaturalist Observations", is marked as retiring.
- coverage
- global
- resolution
- individual observation points above 1:144k, H3 hexagon summaries below
- cadence
- monthly
- access
- ArcGIS Living Atlas feature service under the Esri Master License Agreement
- format
- ArcGIS feature service
- homepage
- https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=996576ae63d4499c924aabea1c3d3768
requires this data or input
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Community platform where people photograph plants, animals and fungi and others identify them; the observations are published as open biodiversity data for research and conservation.
Tags: biodiversity, gis, observations, living atlas, feature service