I also love the Seek app that they provide (maybe this overlaps with the linked app in functionality?). As someone who's grown fonder of Nature in general over the last decade but who has little actual knowledge of the regional flora and fauna, it's a great way to engage with the plants and little bugs in my garden (or others' while on walks and such).

Fun to travel and "pokemon" some new local stuff too.

I use iNaturalist semi-regularly and was about to start using it for a rewilding project I'm involved in, so looked into that and some of the alternatives.

I really like how easy it is to use, the various views on the data (incl. geofenced projects and places), the fact you can export it all back out again, the volunteer and "AI" assist on IDing stuff etc.

But I guess the main other pro for me was that, in the UK at least, most of the data I've put into iNaturalist that's made Research Grade has also been imported into iRecord and NBNAtlas which wouldn't happen the other way round, so 3 for the price of 1. See https://nbn.org.uk/inaturalistuk/inaturalistuk-and-its-place...

I know there's various grumblings about observation quality from iRecord users relating to iNaturalist records, but I'm assuming this is people just not following the published guidance???

And I made this silly game. Name the beast, where you get a picture and try to guess (or know) the scientific name. https://name-the-beast.skabb.com

It is a gem. There are all kinds of fun location/organism-specific tools you can put together with the public read-only data, and owlsnearme is a good example of that. I just used it to check my area and learned there are snowy owls nearby, which is new to me!

The iNat API certainly has some quirks and shortcomings, but in terms of usability it's uncommonly good compared to most biodiversity platforms. I maintain the python API client[1], which is used for data visualizations, doing useful things with your own observation data (which is how I got into it), Jupyter notebooks, Discord bots, and some research/education workflows.

[1] https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist

I know this app!

I once used it to check whether it would identify some birds that are prevalent in my area.

Not related to the app's fubctionality, but it was pretty funny when I replayed my recording of parrot noises to crop it and the next moment, a walnut shell dropped from the tree above.

Animals apparently don't like being recorded!

Love the owl website. Feedback/suggestion: when I clicked on use my location, it should show me all matches in a given radius of that location instead of waiting for me to fill something in the search box. The browser asked for permission and I allowed to share my location.

Incredible. 7 owls near me! Thank you both for this, love it very much.

My son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !

I can hide my home-based observation locations, but others usually do not. People who post observations in my front yard cause other iNat users to visit. This hasn't been a problem in that there have been only a few additional visitors, and they are friendly. Still, I don't like my yard being publicized.

People who walk by the yard might tell their friends, but ordinary word-of-mouth can't be queried online. Not yet.

EDIT: We did have what turned out to be a significant invasive species observation. It was published in my SO's account with the location obscured. I looked up the species online and realized it might be a concern, so I killed it and put it in the freezer. In the meantime, the California Agricultural Inspectors got wind of it and contacted iNat to obtain the email address associated with the account. After making contact, they sent someone to pick up my specimen, and the later, 4 inspectors (yes, really, 3 inspectors and a supervisor) were sent to look for additional specimens. None were found.

Unrelated to this incident, I posted endangered species (not on our property) in my account, and iNat automatically obscures the location. Later on, I got an ~~email~~ message via iNat from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife asking for access to the precise locations, which I gladly provided.

hey, iNat eng here, just want to chime in that this is all great feedback!

here's [1] some extra info on iNat's current geoprivacy treatment and [2] guidance on how to configure this for our different platforms for individual `Observations` (our core domain entity to which geo is attached).

I'll at least share that this is on our radar to look at, but I wouldn't expect changes in the next few months. For now, we still want your observations, but if this is a concern you have, please take a look at the geoprivacy settings!

[1]: iNat's geoprivacy explainer https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/1... [2]: platform-specific guidance on configuring geoprivacy for an Observation https://help.inaturalist.org/en/support/solutions/articles/1...

iNat eng here, non-authoritative rep

handling this concern is on our radar but I can't speak to delivery timeline. It my involve timed "obscured" windows (obscure things for this hiking weekend) and/or user-configurable geofences (obscure observations around my home but not anywhere else).

we _also_ want to respect the geoprivacy of wildlife: sometimes observations generate _problematic_ attention. For sensitive species, we want people to report them, but we don't want to be complicit in or responsible for interested people flocking to the observation and potentially spooking the observed species.

Hah. I grew up when everyone had their names in the phone book with phone number and home address. It matters more to some people than others.

Does this matter if my account is some random username about birds?

Like all people learn is "someone does in fact live at that address and they use this app"

I have my house covered in observations and it would not take a rocket scientist to figure out where I live. I'm also a big believer in accurately tagging observations with locations of things in case someone else wants to try to find it. If someone wants to come to my house and take pictures of spring tails they're welcome to lol

I feel like this ship has already sailed. The home addresses of most people, especially if they have lived in the same place for awhile, is already online. In my case, even my salary info is online because I am a public employee.

I mean I do agree, and on iNat I can clearly see my house and the house of a few other people in the neighborhood. However you can easily find the current owner information for a given house in the state I live in, and since we bought the house, our name.

I guess it is different once you look at people renting, and also you could track a specific person posts to see when they are posting away from home for example. But as far as revealing your home address, sadly there are many other ways in a lot of cases

Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of this, the default should be low precision location data with a random offset per item + random offset per user.

There's an option to obscure the exact location of plants, but it's not obvious.

Wait until you see what happens when you type your address into google earth.

https://youtu.be/xicsyakpIL4

Merlin, ebird, rock identifier, and inaturalist are some of the great apps to use while out in nature.

I'm a big fan of Merlin and learning more about its development changed my perspective on software development! I wrote about that here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...

There's Merlin and then there's Birdnet too https://birdnet.cornell.edu/. Both by Cornell.

Merlin is great for identifying birds, but I could never understand how to just post the information to the community for them to verify the observation. Compared to Seek / iNaturalist I find the uploading process complicated and I still have no idea how to do it.

Aaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo

Indispensable app. Works extremely well.

This app sparked a kind of existential change for me, also during the pandemic. I realized taking these long walks around Seattle that I didn’t know almost any of the plants. The “ah ha” moment was that I realized at any point almost 50% of my visual field was dominated by things I didn’t even know the names of. As a curious engineer this is not acceptable.

So I would take walks and try to identify any plant I didn’t know. The first day I didn’t even make it around the block. Over the course of moths I got better and could go a few miles before spotting a (native) plant I had no idea about. Now I know when most flowers bloom, what’s wdible, what’s poisonous, what’s related, and it’s fun to share with other plant people too.

Seattle is such a beautiful place to learn about plant life, since it is so temperate the city is like a world tree museum. Almost any kind of tree that doesn’t prefer desert will grow here and people over the centuries have planted many unique and exotic varieties.

Points are rendered server-side, backed by Elasticsearch, and served as PNG tiles for each zoom level. Individual markers are only rendered for small sets. Some of the relevant source code:

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...

You may want to look into the PMTiles format and tippecanoe. It efficiently produces pyramidal XYZ tile overviews of vector data. Sometimes this is also done server side via the PostGIS asMVT ffunction, or Martin.

For client side rendering, deck.gl is quite good, also a newer library called lonboard from DevelopmentSeed.

Hey, good news! Pollination ecologist + ML guy here; with open models coming soon.

You can keep an eye on (gh) polli-labs/linnaeus (a bit stale; I'll rebase on my private repo later tonight-). There's some cool ideas in here to exploit the structure of taxonomic hierarchies to help the model approach recognition how a professional taxonomist might.. so working from coarse to fine, taxonomy-guided label smoothing (distributing alpha mass by taxonomic distance)..and (forthcoming) RL on expert consensus to teach abstention (if an expert could only identify a specimen to genus for some set of inputs; then our model should abstain from a species classification for the same inputs). Unfortunately I am very, very compute-constrained- but shooting for late April/first week of May for insect + flowering plant models. (Other taxa will come later; probably as unified model). I'm working on camera-based (automated) ecological monitoring systems for ~6yrs at this point; it's a really fun problem space! dropped out of grad school to go all-in on automating my favorite job I ever had (pollination ecology field research..watching flowers for visitations!); since I knew I'd always be a mediocre ecologist- but an engineer that happens to care about ecology could be very very valuable to my field.

a taxa recognition model turns out to be only a small piece of the system you need to extract structured observational data from cameras in the field :-) Working with one of my partners right now to launch a really cool demo of what's possible these days- Texas folks especially; keep an eye out on wildflower.org around May 1!

I'll spill more ink soon but (anyone) please get in touch if you find these things interesting. Or if you'd like to help me out with compute/expenses!

I don't know if it will work, but Pl@ntNet Identify (which I use often) seems to have an API: https://docs.plantnet.org/en/reference/api-plantnet/

I've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.

i know this guy and the app is great, feels like pokemon for animals in chicago

iNaturalist would agree with you; they explicitly say[1] it's not meant to be the primary source for your photos. Users generally fall into a couple broad camps:

1. Mostly use the mobile app, and take photos and upload observations directly from there. Local photo collection either isn't a priority or is backed up by their phone's cloud sync.

2. Mostly use inaturalist.org via a desktop browser, with either a standalone digital camera or mobile photos synced to desktop. Local filesystem (hopefully plus backups) is the source of truth.

I have been working on a desktop application[2] with a long-term goal of full bidirectional sync, and a secondary goal of offline usage. The current feature set is fairly modest and read-only, though, focusing on organizing local photos using data from iNat.

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about

[2] https://github.com/pyinat/naturtag

See my other comment in this thread! I've got you covered; launching open models in ~1month. Happy to answer any questions!

This is the only app of this kind that is simple enough for my grandma to use it and that works offline.

Birdnet iirc has separate recording, selecting, uploading, and results steps, which I tried to teach but it's too much. iNaturalist confuses even me about what buttons I'm supposed to be pressing if I just want to know what plant I'm looking at and not upload whatever (meta)data about me and my device to whatever (public?) database. Definitely recommend anyone to check out Whobird if you just want a simple, offline solution for bird sounds!

is there any FOSS app for plants?

Both iNaturalist and Observation.org publish observation data to GBIF:

https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...

https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f6...

that's funny because we _just_ introduced cloudflare.

it's not my wheelhouse, but it would be comedic so let me know if you get the legit cloudflare host connection warning _and then_ land on the how it works that you mentioned looks like cloudflare.

iNaturalist was created by and remained a part of the California Academy of Science

I'm not sure that's the case, my impression was they simply took funding from and sheltered under the CAS until they split off to their own organization.

In their new independent structure they're claiming to be a public interest science non-profit, but as they don't publish their models or model-building-process, it's non-replicable, so in my view it's not Science, and the public never gets their hands on the product.

it sort of feels like iNaturalists goals as an organization may not be as aligned with the original charter as they once were

As another user who has contributed five digits of observations (over double yours), I couldn't agree more.

I expected fewer butterflies and more asses.