Tracking biodiversity with iNaturalist

We track biodiversity in Chapel using iNaturalist, a website for recording the natural world - there’s also an app for your phone.

How to use iNaturalist

First of all you create a personal account and then you can start uploading your observations.

You need to take the best photos you can so that correct identifications can be made. Then you should try to identify the subject - there is a box to record this.  

Start typing the name in and it will bring up various options. iNaturalist is a global database so scientific names are used as well as common names as these can be misleading.  

As a an example what we just call a robin is listed as a European robin - Eruthacus rubecula.  Don’t worry you don’t have to learn Latin it’s all done for you.

The date, time and location is also recorded. Other notes such as male/female, caterpillar etc can be added.

How to join the Chapel-en-le-Frith project

You can search to join a project or as many projects as you want.

Chapel en le Frith Biodiversity Group have created our own project which has been defined with a map of the parish area and if your observation is within that area (and is from January 2023 onwards) it automatically adds the data to the project.  

At the start of 2025 we reached 3120 observations of which 932 were separate species.

Don’t worry if your observation isn’t in Chapel en le Frith Biodiversity Group area - please record it anyway as every observation is useful to the scientific community using iNaturalist. 

The Chapel project only extracts data that fits in the boundary of Chapel so for example if you add an observation in Buxton it will not add this to the project (but of course still to your personal account). This is why it's good to join many projects as even if we don't use the data, another group will!

Any questions or need some help? Email us at chapelbiodiversity@gmail.com