What if the most important step you can take for biodiversity is simply… noticing?Species are disappearing far faster than we can track, and for many of them, our entire scientific record amounts to a handful of specimens scattered across museum shelves.My guest today, Scott Loarie, has spent the last decade building one of the most hopeful counterforces to that trend: iNaturalist. What started as a simple idea — “What if anyone could help record the living world with their phone?” — has grown into one of the largest biodiversity datasets on Earth. Most of what scientists now know about many species comes not from elite field research, but from millions of everyday people noticing what’s around them.
The Power of Noticing: Scott Loarie on…
What if the most important step you can take for biodiversity is simply… noticing?Species are disappearing far faster than we can track, and for many of them, our entire scientific record amounts to a handful of specimens scattered across museum shelves.My guest today, Scott Loarie, has spent the last decade building one of the most hopeful counterforces to that trend: iNaturalist. What started as a simple idea — “What if anyone could help record the living world with their phone?” — has grown into one of the largest biodiversity datasets on Earth. Most of what scientists now know about many species comes not from elite field research, but from millions of everyday people noticing what’s around them.