How to use the iNaturalist Website Header Search

Modified on Thu, 8 Aug at 10:43 AM

If you're logged on to the iNaturalist website, you should see the search box in the header of almost any page:



The header search returns results in four major categories:


When you start typing in the search field, iNaturalist will display matches from those four categories. For example, let’s look at the results after entering singapore:



Places like Singapore and Malaysia and Singapore have a map marker icon, as they are iNaturalist Places, and taxa, users, and projects have their respective icons next to them, with gray text to help you discern what they are.

For each option you can select either View Observations, which will take you to the Explore page for that taxon/user/place/project, or About, which will take you to its information page. Thus, selecting View Observations for Butterflies of Singapore leads to https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=2310 and About leads to https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/butterflies-of-singapore

If you’re not seeing what you’re searching for in these ten results, you can enter more text or click on View All at the bottom to see all results for your search, eg https://www.inaturalist.org/search?q=singapore 

Hitting enter on your keyboard will do this as well, so long as your pointer is not over one of the search results.


On this page, you can go through all the results or filter them by type (left arrow). A search box is also available (right arrow):


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