The iNaturalist API is an absolute gem. It doesn't require authentication for read-only operations and it has open CORS headers which means it's amazing for demos and tutorials.
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.
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???
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.
This was a lifesaver around 2020 for me, documenting local critters and chatting about them. I've had immense satifaction in sharing my excitement for wildlife with others.
Great app, easy interface, friendly community. Thank you iNaturalist team!
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.
Do you work for iNaturalist? If so, please clarify if this commitment is official and whether it includes the full build process to achieve replicable builds and input data not just a build artifact (which would not be replicable, and therefore not be Science under iNaturalist's public interest Science tax-shelter status).
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.
I send things too iNaturalist all the time, it's great, it really helped me learn about my local fauna. I want to do a project with their API to identify a couple hundred wildflower photos I've been hoarding. Would that work? ( Idea is my wildflower app could send to their models to confirm my original identification)
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!
This site was helpful in documenting the spread of lantern flies (invasive critters that damage trees on the U.S. East Coast) - the more folks that report sightings (of anything not just problem critters) the better for all concerned.
Conversely, its also beneficial to report sightings of helpful bugs/birds/bats/etc. so can get an early warning when a population starts to thin out.
I love this app, but it's also a significant doxxing risk especially for the large number of non-technical users that it has. A quick look at the map reveals the home addresses and names of many iNaturalist users in my neighborhood, lots of them older folks that probably don't realize that adding all of the neat wildlife that they see in their backyard (or uploading things they see on remote hikes without any 3G coverage once their phone connects to their home wifi network) is also putting their home address on display by adding a cluster of photos right next to their house that are all attached to their account.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
I’ve been using Observation.org (or rather its localized version Waarneming.nl) to record my hedgehog sightings. Should I use both platforms, or do these data points end up aggregated downstream anyway?
Does anyone know how they make their map so performant? Showing all those pins is mind blowing to me coming from leaflet maps. Marinetraffic is also a map that blows me away every time i see all the icons and how smooth and fast the loading is when zooming in. Would love to make a similar map at some point for my hobby but leaflet just does not cut it when you want to render 10million plus pins on a global map.
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!
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.
A genuinely good-for-the-world project. The data is really useful for science and for machine learning. You can export all the research-grade identifications of fungi to train a classifier; if that’s what you’re into.
I wish there was some kind of desktop application that I could sit down and locally organize my data into, allowing me to keep a full quality source while syncing a copy to naturalist for others to benefit from.
As it stands, I don’t really have a system in place, and I don’t want to put a lot of effort into a lossy (assets get compressed and stripped of metadata) online project.
Haven't tried iNaturalist yet, but I love Merlin Bird ID [1] and Flora Incognita [2]. The latter seems to be exceptionally accurate (over 80% up to 98% depending on the dataset) [3]. They also expose an API for "registered external clients" [4], but so far I sadly wasn't able to find any further documentation on it.
A problem I often have with Merlin is that the birds seem to know when I record them, and promptly stop singing...
For anyone who has cameras outside with a rtsp stream, it is incredibly easy to setup a real-time bird monitor around your property. It's amazing what species it will detect every day.
I'm looking for the same thing for insects but haven't found one. I want to know all the things I'm hearing.
65 comments
[ 8.2 ms ] story [ 92.5 ms ] threadMy partner and I built this website with it a few years ago: https://www.owlsnearme.com/
(I realize this is a bit on-brand for me but I also use it to track pelicans https://tools.simonwillison.net/species-observation-map#%7B%... )
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!
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???
Great app, easy interface, friendly community. Thank you iNaturalist team!
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.
[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
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!
Conversely, its also beneficial to report sightings of helpful bugs/birds/bats/etc. so can get an early warning when a population starts to thin out.
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.
https://youtu.be/xicsyakpIL4
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.
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...
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
Tech blogs or pointers would be great
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!
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.
As it stands, I don’t really have a system in place, and I don’t want to put a lot of effort into a lossy (assets get compressed and stripped of metadata) online project.
A problem I often have with Merlin is that the birds seem to know when I record them, and promptly stop singing...
[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
[2] https://floraincongita.com/
[3] https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10676
[4] https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13611
For anyone who has cameras outside with a rtsp stream, it is incredibly easy to setup a real-time bird monitor around your property. It's amazing what species it will detect every day.
I'm looking for the same thing for insects but haven't found one. I want to know all the things I'm hearing.
User Insights and Analytics Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/kwwnthztts
Technical Delivery Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/ppeyvinuw4
does it allow to save observations without publishing? want a pokedeck
The fact that this even exists is so sad. CORS is such an ill-conceived idea
Also I am unclear as far as the app. Is it F/LOSS? If so, why is it not on other repos like F-Droid?