Creation Care with Your Phone

By Mike Merchant, Creation Care Team

Can your cell phone bring you closer to God? Absolutely.

While it’s true our phones have potential for both good and mischief, they certainly can bring us closer to God. One way they can do this is by providing eyes to see his creation, using an increasingly popular phone app called iNaturalist, or iNat by its users. This tool is one of the best ways I know to connect with nature and potentially help life on the planet at the same time.

When you use iNat you join a community of nature lovers around the world who are committed to recording all forms of life in their region.

Here’s the basic idea. See a plant or animal, take a picture and upload it to iNat with the click of a button. An artificial intelligence algorithm then analyzes your picture, and in most cases, can put a name to what you’re seeing. You don’t even have to be a birder or plant expert to use the app.

So how does this help nature? Besides helping you connect with nature/creation, your observation is added to the app’s database, creating a permanent record of what you’ve seen. Every observation, big or small, helps map biodiversity and track changes in ecosystems over time. Since the app was launched, over 7,000 scientific papers have used iNat data, and more are being published every year as more people contribute pictures.

While I was working as an entomologist in Texas, one 8-year-old naturalist contributed a picture that was the first evidence that an exotic invasive had arrived in the state. Other contributors have supplied the first-known images of rare animals in the wild or expanded the known ranges for insects and plants.

Such contributions are invaluable in helping scientists document these changes and needs for conservation.

I see my contributions to iNat as another way to serve and honor God. By taking the time to “see” plants, insects and birds more closely, I feel a closer connection to the creation and its Creator. And helping science is a way of helping the environment—part of our biblical mandate to steward the earth.

If you’d like to learn more about iNat and hear some inspiring ways it is helping heal the world check out this TED talk from Vancouver in 2025. You can download the app from your app store (iOS or Android). You can also access the app through the website at https://www.inaturalist.org/.

Photo caption: iNaturalist can identify plants, fungi and animals, like this pileated woodpecker from my backyard.

iNaturalist can identify plants, fungi and animals, like this pileated woodpecker from my backyard.