iNaturalist - App for Nature Lovers
This week we're taking a look at tools useful for watershed exploration. One that may not immediately leap to mind is your phone - more specifically, an app on your phone that allows you to research flora and fauna within the watershed before even stepping foot or muck boot outdoors.
A quick Google search might list several such apps, but searching on my iPhone revealed only one still active: iNaturalist. It might have been survival of the fittest (we can hope) or it might have been "too many cooks in the kitchen" - if someone who wants the data has to check too many places to get a comprehensive overview, it could become just as tedious as searching for the data raw.
What iNaturalist does, though, is takes the idea of "citizen scientists" and puts it on your phone or tablet. Now anyone and everyone who is signed up can photograph, GPS locate, and identify species in their backyard or on their vacation and upload it to one server - and all the data is available to other users, and the scientific community at large to explore, collate, and refine.
Check out the link to their website at the end of the slideshow, and download the app now: it's free!
Enjoy!
A quick Google search might list several such apps, but searching on my iPhone revealed only one still active: iNaturalist. It might have been survival of the fittest (we can hope) or it might have been "too many cooks in the kitchen" - if someone who wants the data has to check too many places to get a comprehensive overview, it could become just as tedious as searching for the data raw.
What iNaturalist does, though, is takes the idea of "citizen scientists" and puts it on your phone or tablet. Now anyone and everyone who is signed up can photograph, GPS locate, and identify species in their backyard or on their vacation and upload it to one server - and all the data is available to other users, and the scientific community at large to explore, collate, and refine.
Check out the link to their website at the end of the slideshow, and download the app now: it's free!
Enjoy!
Thanks for this! I'm going to check it out. I've tried some of the plant identification apps in the past and they have been difficult to work with, not the least of which because they can take up so much space. It's definitely worth checking back and trying the latest, and in this case the only survivor!
ReplyDeleteI love iNaturalist. We used it for the bioblitz at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park. Also we have citizens looking out for invasive species when I was there. It actually helped us find a batch of tree of heaven that otherwise we wouldn't have found. What a great tool!
ReplyDeleteI've been using a similar app, iMapInvasives for a citizen science project in another class and it has also been a great tool for identifying positive and negative results in general or towards specific projects. Really cool stuff and quite low cost as well.
ReplyDeleteHi Daniel, this is a really great app.! I can see this very useful to the mainland U.S and other places where internet connection is fast, but not here in American Samoa where we only have two carriers and internet can get slow at times. I would love to see that app here in Samoa, with an additional feature such as satellite use like what the satellite phone has. This way we could still have connectivity when we reach gray areas with no internet connection.
ReplyDelete