iNaturalist made the first page of the New York Times on Sunday 12/11/2022! You can read the entire article by Amy Harmon here.
The article begins with a mention of my Water Clover observation. This observation is still one of my favorite iNaturalist stories of all times. Photographed in Barker Dam, Joshua Tree National Park back on 12/25/2016, in a little fresh water pool in the middle of the desert. I thought it might be amphibian eggs, but I had no clue what it really was. Other people had no clues either, and many people wrote comments, tagged each other, or shared the observation, until Kevin Clark (@kclarksdnhmorg on iNaturalist) identified it as the aquatic sporangium of a fern called Water Clover (Marsilea vestita).
The article tells the story of the kind spirit of the iNaturalist community. Take a look at the word cloud below to see a visualization of the daily interactions on the platform.
The word cloud was made by Scott Loarie, iNaturalist co-director. From his post on iNaturalist:
"The word cloud below was generated from 1,000,000 words randomly selected from the ~200,000 comments posted to iNaturalist in the last month. I made it because I was hoping to see Thank and Please featured prominently, and they are :)"
I couldn't agree more. iNaturalist is such a pleasant place to spend countless hours... See you on iNaturalist!