From The Huffington Post
Your iPhone: A Crowd-Sourced Field Guide to Save the Planet
By David Kroodsma
"Look, an alligator!" I joked, as a small lizard ran across the path.
I grabbed my iPhone, which was already open to the iNaturalist app, and snapped a picture. The phone's GPS tagged the photo with my latitude and longitude. I tapped on the screen, typing "lizard" into the text box and then, when I hit "sync," the phone uploaded the photo to the iNaturalist website....
But as I learned by speaking with one of the website's founders, iNaturalist is much more than just a field guide. It's also a way to determine where species live: by using the power of the crowd it can develop range maps of every species on earth....
The site was originally the master's project of a few students at the UC Berkeley School of Information, and since then they have teamed up with researchers at Stanford and Save the Redwoods (they even built a special iPhone app just for redwoods). The entire site has been built by naturalists for naturalists, with the hope that it will eventually be the Wikipedia of life and biodiversity....