iNaturalist strikes out on its own

How the hell does the Seek by iNaturalist app work so well and also be small/performant enough to the job completely offline on a phone? You should really try it out for IDing animals and plants if you haven't, it's like a real life pokedex. Have they released any information (e.g. a whitepaper?) about how the model works or how it was trained? The ability to classify things incrementally and phylogenetically makes it helpful to narrow down your own search even when it doesn't know the exact species. I've been surprised by it even IDing the insects that made specific galls on random leaves or plants.

Most (or all?) of iNaturalist&#x27;s code is open source (typically MIT), see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;inaturalist">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;inaturalist</a><p>A lot of iNaturalist data is open data, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;inaturalist&#x2F;inaturalist-open-data">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;inaturalist&#x2F;inaturalist-open-data</a><p>(It&#x27;s up to each user to decide how they want to license their observations, photos, and sounds. The options are all-rights-reserved [no license], CC0, CC-BY, and various other CC license.)

I&#x27;m a big fan of their &quot;Seek&quot; app and have used it a bunch. It has a similar &quot;game&quot; loop like Pokemon Go, but without any mtx, plus you learn a lot about your local ecosystems.<p>If you have kids I highly recommend pulling out the app during a nature walk.

I&#x27;m so glad this happened and they weren&#x27;t acquired by some shitty tech company.

Perhaps the most successful &quot;natural&quot; social-network out there, well deserved. Now if we can just get citizen scientists cheap scopes and better camera lenses so we can actually make those photos of critters &lt; 2mm useful (at scale) we&#x27;d see research potential rocket.

Great news. Seek is the #1 app I recommend parents for their children if they’re going to be using a smart phone. A tool that helps us engage with and appreciate our natural environment with nice gamification. Helped me identify some of my favorite sages and other aromatic plants.

I&#x27;m a huge fan of the Seek app. It does a much better job than the attempts Apple makes at IDing plants and animals in photos I&#x27;ve taken.<p>I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s an issue of the image not having enough data, but Apple seems to always try and pin down a species or two whereas Seek seems to only tell me what it knows.

Has anyone used PlantNet&#x27;s app[0] and compared accuracy to iNaturalist? Been using the former and it seems to identify successfully, though I can&#x27;t say I&#x27;ve used to identify more &quot;exotic&quot; fauna. Might give iNaturalist a try.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;identify.plantnet.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;identify.plantnet.org&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;d never heard of iNaturalist until recently. Then it turned out one of my young adult family members had started developing quite a reputation on there - has found a few undescribed&#x2F;ambiguous&#x2F;out of range species of animal in quite a short period of time, and I think that it might have a strong influence on their coming career.

This is so beautiful! Congrats to everyone for pulling off a great project and now it has the ability to actually continue to do great things with a better future.<p>Very positive to see

Anecdotal, but I&#x27;ve gotten better results from iNaturalist than from the built in camera search on my phone, especially for insects.

I love the app. Each week I discover a new to me species of insect in my garden. When the AI fails to work (relatively rarely) the community usually quickly manually identify it.<p>I’ve had less success with trees but it’s still pretty good.<p>The focus on images is a bit iffy. Usually I take the photo using the phones native camera app to overcome.

What’s the model for them decide when to say a new species has been found, rather than just a variant of a known species?<p>Or more generally, whats the generation of a species? It can’t be just whether they can produce offspring together because some different species has been shown to produce viable offspring.

If they could drop their dependencies on Google Services for Seek I would be ecstatic. The identification works perfect but I would love to be able to view&#x2F;post locations.

Are there any apks available outside of the Play store?

Hopefully they&#x27;ll get the app into F-Droid.

Good on ‘em!<p>Great service, and great app.