As many of you know, I am very much a fanboy of inaturalist.org.
Like you can go to this page put in your location/town/city/district/region etc (no sign in needed) and see what plants/animals/fungi people have seen in your area. In the species field if you only want to see a particular species (or genera, or order or phylum etc) you can look that up. You can just look up a random species without a place and see where in the world its spotted.
Its okay to be smart did a pretty good intro to it.
In terms of contributing to science, not only is the general data used, but I have now been contacted directly (on the site) several times to help in direct research relative to my observations) so its cool if you want to passively "do a science"
Do you use this site? Why, Why not? What would it take to get you to? Any questions about it?
If you dont want to contribute data to the site, you can use seek by inaturalist to try and ID things without giving anything back to the site. Good if you have kids wanting to learn species.
(Note to mods, whilst this is about a non-gaia site, there is no income for any users, its purely a contribute to science site, I get nothing from people using it, besides the win for world science)
Like do I think you can tell if something is a plant vs an animal? Yeah I would guess mostly.
Like if you upload a pic of a plant, and us the ID "Plant". That is sufficient enough to make it likely someone who knows more about plants is likely to add a higher level ID.
Even then the computer vision will usually make a okay enough guess to suggest what it might be.
That said, I know some some algaes for example may look like plants. But thats why the site works on consensus of at least 2/3rds agreeance, before a observation becomes research grade.
I use iNaturalist! I'm a pro with house plants but not with outdoor plants. I use it whenever I'm out and about (which isn't too often anymore...) or even when we get in a plant at work that I'm not familiar with. It isn't always 100% accurate but I know enough about plant physiology to recognize when that's the case.
In my National Park Visitor Centre I work in, I do push people pretty much most days to try the site.
When people ask me about IDing species, I tend to show them the species on that site, or if I dont know the exact species (Often the case with fungi) I can search the likely family, and show them potentials. Or if people want to know where they can see a certain thing (Like the Silver Fern, our national fern) I can show them distribution maps etc.
The only thing I get out of it, is hopefully it encourages more people to form relationships with nature, and potentially care more about how they interact with the world, and potentially things they do which impact it.
You know the whole Baba Dioum quote "“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” Inat, really allows you to choose the nature path which appeals most to you.
BUT REALLY....I love seeing what others are seeing, and that helps me in my quest to know "all the species" especially local ones. The more people looking the more chance people will see stuff not often seen.
Yes, I use Seek all the time! heart It is so useful for documenting species growth and loss, and is really helpful to beginners trying to get into herbalism and the like (as long as they take it with a grain of salt and do their research).
I'm so glad others appreciate the power of nature! heart
I use iNaturalist! I'm a pro with house plants but not with outdoor plants. I use it whenever I'm out and about (which isn't too often anymore...) or even when we get in a plant at work that I'm not familiar with. It isn't always 100% accurate but I know enough about plant physiology to recognize when that's the case.
I suck at plants, I mean I am not to bad with local natives, but local weeds...I have a very long way to go, like telling hawksbit, hawksbeard, catsear etc apart.
Do you upload obs? I assume you dont put the houseplants on there, since its for wild organisms. Though you can put houseplants, and then tag them "casual" to make sure they arent included in data.
Thats what I like about computer vision, as more people add more pics, and they keep training the AI it keeps getting better.
Like in the last update
"We released a new computer vision model today. It has 71,286 taxa, up from 69,966. This new model (v2.1) was trained on data exported last month on January 15th and added 1,770 new taxa."
So it is getting better quicker, part of my push to help people "train the robots"....
Yes, I use Seek all the time! heart It is so useful for documenting species growth and loss, and is really helpful to beginners trying to get into herbalism and the like (as long as they take it with a grain of salt and do their research).
I'm so glad others appreciate the power of nature! heart
Also, your avatar is really cool!
Do you use inaturalist as well? I encourage seek for kids, to make sure they dont give out personal data. But encourage adults to use inaturalist so your observations actually help map out species, and help with research. It also needs 2/3rds consensus on species IDs to consider something research grade. Where as seek just uses a best guess based on computer vision.
Thanks, its an old one, but it seems to be one of my most faved, so always nice to rock it now and again.
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