ИСТИНА

Modern technologies make it possible to collect information on the distribution of living organisms with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Thus, 60% of records in Global Biodiversity Information Facility (https://www.gbif.org/) on dated records of living organisms were made in the last ten years (2011–2021) during field research. In most cases, researchers are now collecting data in electronic form directly in the field using various gadgets. This information is rapidly entering the global data circulation, using GBIF platform as a rule. A special role in the collection of big data on biodiversity is played by non-professional researchers who generate electronic datasets on records of various plants, animals and fungi using simple public platforms like ebird, iNaturalist, Pl@ntNet, Naturgucker and many others. Over the past two years, both iNaturalist website and app have gained unprecedented popularity in Russia, largely due to the emergence of our project “Flora of Russia” in early 2019 (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/flora-of-russia). Currently, it has over 910,000 observations based on photos from 11,000 users.