How can I contact a user on iNaturalist? Can iNaturalist contact them for me?

There are two primary ways to contact another user on iNaturalist: using an @-mention in a public comment, or directly messaging them. Both require that you have an iNaturalist account.

Using an @-mention

You can @-mention another user (sometimes called "tagging" the user) by adding an @ symbol before their username in any comment or in the description of an observation. The user will be notified that you mentioned them. So if you wanted to get identifciation help from example_user, you could write a comment like:

@example_user what do you think of this identification?

Directly Messaging a User

If you have an iNaturalist account, you can send a direct message to another user on iNaturalist via the website or the iNaturalist Android app (go to the side menu). Messaging is not supported in the iNaturalist iOS/iPadOS app.

To message another user on the website: you can either:

• Go to the user's profile page and click on "Message [username]". You can find a user with the header search.
  
  
• Go to https://www.inaturalist.org/messages and click on "New message"
  

By default iNaturalist sends an email of the message to the user. However, some users may have turned off email notifications for messages.

Note: you must have at least three verifiable observations or have made three identifications for other users before you can send a message to another user.

iNaturalist will not contact a user for you, nor will we divulge a user's contact information.