Observation.org

Observation.org is a citizen science organization collecting and presenting international plant, animal and other nature observations. The aim of Observation.org is to provide an up to date insight into biodiversity. For this purpose observations are collected from thousands of amateur and professional nature lovers. The observations concern all living species but mainly consist of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles, butterflies, dragonflies, other arthropods, fish, mollusks, fungi, mosses / lichens and other plants. Observational records can be enhanced with pictures and / or sounds that are linked to the primary observations. Data quality is ensured by validation by a team of international taxonomic specialists. Our fully automatic recognition system ObsIdentify supports users in identifying species. Most of the observations presented on Observation.org are open to the public. In order to prevent poaching or damage to rare species, detailed location information is sometimes obscured or observations are placed under embargo. Observation.org started out as the work of a small group of volunteers but has grown into a very successful organization generating millions of species observations each year. The database consists of over 100.000.000 observations in 2018. In several European countries local versions of Observation.org provide the main source of nature information.