Gilles San Martin

Joined: Feb 20, 2019 Last Active: Mar 27, 2024 iNaturalist

I'm a naturalist, entomologist and data scientist living in Belgium.

My main interests are insects and other invertebrates and more particularly ladybirds (Coccinellidae) and Orthoptera. But as a naturalist, I'm pretty much curious about everything in nature living or not... I also have a strong interest in photography.

I'm active on other regional biodiversity databases in Belgium (eg as validator), but the two key advantages of iNaturalist are for me
1) its open data and open source philosophy. I want my data to available and used for research or nature conservation. Data that are not open are simply locked and impossible to use in many situations... I love that the research grade data are uploaded to GBIF. Open source means that other specific tools can be built on top of iNaturalist by anybody (with the required technical skills and without the need of the agreement of any right owner).
2) its more international focus. Data outside Belgium are more susceptible to be available for and used by interested users, broader range of taxonomy specialists, economy of scale for the maintenance of the system,...

I also like some technical aspects of the platform like it's capacity to find back the species IDs within the metadata of my tagged and geotagged pictures and the very fast identification interface thanks to the keyboard shortcuts.

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