Inaturalist MCP Server

@cyanheads/inaturalist-mcp-server Search wildlife sightings, read identification threads, rank taxa by area, chart phenology, and find look-alike taxa from iNaturalist via MCP. STDIO or Streamable HTTP. 10 Tools • 2 Domain Resources • 1 Skill

Public Hosted Server: https://inaturalist.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Overview

iNaturalist's index of 387M+ georeferenced citizen-science observations of plants, animals, and fungi. Search sightings by area, date, taxon, and annotation; read the identification thread behind a record; chart when a taxon appears; rank the taxa of an area; and explore related taxa through shared identification evidence. No API key required.

Tools

Resources

Both resources mirror data also reachable through inaturalist_get_taxon and inaturalist_get_observation, for clients that don't surface MCP resources.

The published inaturalist-guide covers identifier provenance, matched cohorts, annotations, and evidence coverage across calls. It ships with npm, plugin, MCPB, and Docker installs; clients supporting MCP skill discovery can retrieve it directly. The SDK also exposes skill resources alongside the two domain resources.

Capability reference

inaturalist_list_reference tool

• topic picks one table: controlled_terms (fetched live), quality_grades, licenses, ranks, iconic_taxa, or conservation_status_codes; taxon_id, valid only with controlled_terms, adds observed_usage, the annotation pairs recorded for that taxon with counts
• source is upstream or static; annotation attributes and their values carry numeric ids to pass as term_id and term_value_id, since labels repeat across attributes

inaturalist_resolve_name tool

• q plus type: taxon (default; word-start name matching or exact numeric ID, with optional rank) or place / project / user / any (scored cross-kind search with limited spelling tolerance); applied limit up to 30, default 10
• Omit page for relevance-ranked suggestions. Explicit taxon name pages browse ascending taxon IDs from page 1; their multilingual match population can differ from autocomplete. Keep the limit fixed; page × applied limit must stay within 10,000. Numeric taxon IDs have one page
• Each candidate carries kind and id, plus login on users. A true miss returns found: false with guidance; an empty page beyond matching records retains found: true. Every reply discloses totalCount, truncated, shown, and cap

inaturalist_find_places tool

• Exactly one of q (display-name prefix or analyzed words) or all four of nelat, nelng, swlat, swlng, otherwise invalid_geography; per_page is forwarded on both arms, default 10, served maximum 20 per list. Strict mode accepts up to 30, then applies the same served ceiling
• q returns places[], a box returns standard[] and community[]; each place carries id, bbox, ancestor_place_ids, place_type, admin_level, and location, with boundary polygons stripped
• Name autocomplete has no pagination; narrow the text or use a smaller map area to explore further matches. cap is the applied size for names and twice that size for a box's two lists, including empty replies

inaturalist_search_observations tool

• One area form plus taxon_id, d1/d2, quality_grade, captive, term_id+term_value_id, iconic_taxa, hrank/lrank, csi, threatened/native/introduced/endemic, user_id or user_login, project_id, and q+search_on; applied per_page up to 25, default 10; optional sounds filters for audio-bearing records, while include expands photos, annotations, sounds (identification threads live on inaturalist_get_observation)
• page walks the first 10,000 results; past that, order by id descending and pass each page's next_cursor as cursor. Returns total_results (a live estimate) and has_more, and echoes applied_filters
• license / photo_license take the seven CC codes, OR-joined; photo_license matches any photo under the code, independent of the record's own license_code
• The complete serialized reply stays within 50,000 UTF-8 bytes by returning a prefix of whole records. Ordered deferred observation IDs identify the suffix; fetch them with inaturalist_get_observation and the same include before following the upstream page continuation
• acc_below accepts positive fractional metres up to 2,147,483,647 and selects measured accuracy strictly below the threshold, excluding missing accuracy. obscuration accepts obscured, private, and none; it checks both observer and taxon geoprivacy, with none requiring both to be open/unset. month accepts observed calendar months 1–12
• created_d1/created_d2 independently bound upload dates; updated_since accepts a calendar date or ISO datetime with timezone. identifications selects most_agree, some_agree, or most_disagree. Search, by-id records, and observation resources preserve nullable created_at and updated_at strings

inaturalist_get_observation tool

• Submit 1–100 observation_ids: duplicates are removed in first-seen order, the first ten distinct IDs are attempted in one upstream request, and the rest return in deferred; with limit clamping disabled, at most ten submitted IDs are accepted. include defaults to ["identifications"], with comments, photos, annotations, and sounds available
• Resolved records come back in observations in request order, attempted misses in unresolved; fails as not_found only when none resolve and nothing is deferred. Adds community_taxon, description, and filled observation_fields; strings remain complete, so detail replies have no universal byte ceiling
• Identifications, comments, and observation fields share a 40-entry budget: each record keeps max(4, floor(40 / records returned)) entries per array and reports *_total beside *_shown

inaturalist_get_species_counts tool

• Counts leaf taxa, including hybrids and coarser identifications; subspecies roll up to their species. total_results counts taxa, and the species field retains its upstream name.
• introduced, native, threatened, endemic, csi, hrank/lrank, and observed month (integer array, 1–12) are shared with search. rank selects one exact rank; equal rank-band bounds select a level, including both species and hybrid at level 10. Conservation codes match global listings plus listings at exactly place_id, excluding ancestor-place listings. Status flags describe the observation's indexed taxon at its location.
• One area form plus the search filters for taxon, dates, quality grade, captive, annotations, iconic taxa, observer, and project; applied per_page up to 50, default 25, with page offset
• Rows carry position (absolute, counted from page 1), taxon_id, and observation_count; truncationCeiling is the last count shown, which nothing off the page exceeds

inaturalist_get_histogram tool

• interval: month_of_year (default) or week_of_year for a seasonal curve, or year / month / week / day / hour for absolute dates; date_field observed (default) or created; taxon_id optional, and an annotation pair (Life Stage 1 = Larva 6) or iconic_taxa narrows the curve
• Returns up to 25,000 buckets in order, zeros included, with truncated / shown / cap. total sums every upstream bucket in the histogram window, including omitted rows; it is not an all-time taxon count. The row cap is no byte guarantee
• d1/d2 bound observation dates; created_d1/created_d2 separately bound upload dates. date_field selects which date is bucketed without changing either filter pair
• Absolute intervals supply only the selected family's missing lower bound, anchored to its upper bound or today UTC: year/month subtract 100 calendar years