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simonw 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Animals apparently don't like being recorded!
andrewpedelty 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Tomte 4 hours ago [-]
Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away. Usually at that point the bird has gone away, too.
The iNaturalist app doesn‘t. It has more features, but Seek‘s former advantage „let me just the a photo and auto-identify“ is now in the iNaturalist main app, as well, so it is my default now.
bluebarbet 3 hours ago [-]
>Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away.
Frustration shared.
throwanem 3 hours ago [-]
So the modal is doing its job.
bluebarbet 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, it's "doing its job" much in the way a podcast advert you've already heard 1000 times is "doing its job".
andrewpedelty 3 hours ago [-]
That's great to know, I'll give it a shot for sure.
zem 2 hours ago [-]
wow, that would be my cue to uninstall the app and write zeros repeatedly over the place it used to be!
ingonealan3 15 minutes ago [-]
This guy deletes!
GorbachevyChase 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve been pretty disappointed in the seeks applications ability to identify vegetation or insects. It seemed like it was really good a year or two ago and now I just seem to get so many bad predictions.
chhxdjsj 3 hours ago [-]
I stopped using seek and just started using gemini…
martior 2 hours ago [-]
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
simonw 1 hours ago [-]
OK I absolutely love that!
I got 0/4 though on the easiest difficulty level. Feature request: a version where you have to guess the common name instead, I think that would still be fun.
jw_cook 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Incredible. 7 owls near me! Thank you both for this, love it very much.
Galanwe 3 hours ago [-]
My son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !
alejandrorivas 38 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Evidlo 52 seconds ago [-]
> it has open CORS headers which means it's amazing for demos and tutorials.
The fact that this even exists is so sad. CORS is such an ill-conceived idea
ray__ 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kiddico 49 minutes ago [-]
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
getpost 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ray__ 56 minutes ago [-]
Wow, I didn’t know that iNaturalist was so proactive about that sort of thing. It also sounds like you have a really cool yard! :)
getpost 12 minutes ago [-]
I didn't mean to suggest that iNat is proactive, they may well be.
IIRC, the exact chain of events was: Invasive Species Observation posted -> a curator at the LA Natural History saw the post and notified the CDFA (Agriculture Inspectors) -> CDFA contacts iNat to get email address -> CDFA contacts my SO. I don't recall whether iNat had a built-in messaging service at the time (they do now).
Regarding endangered species, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife evidently joined iNaturalist, in part to enhance their data collection. They seem to be monitoring iNaturalist and contacting users who have relevant observations. They seem very sensitive to privacy concerns, and cooperation is voluntary. I'm thrilled a state agency is engaging the public in protecting our natural resources.
These state employees have indeed been proactive.
jakeydus 51 minutes ago [-]
What was the invasive species??
getpost 25 minutes ago [-]
That would be doxxing, not that it matters here.
whyenot 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
whateveracct 3 hours ago [-]
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"
ray__ 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe not, but I'd want to know beforehand either way. And looking through accounts near me suggests that a fair number of users add enough detail to make me think that they don't realize that their info is so public (selfies/profile pictures being the most problematic example imo).
jszymborski 2 hours ago [-]
Yah, this is what I do, however I think this is what GP is talking about when they say savvy (or maybe I'm flattering myself). Plenty of folks with their full details on their profile.
whateveracct 42 minutes ago [-]
Home ownership is in the public record tho, right?
lithocarpus 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jayknight 3 hours ago [-]
It has options to hide or obscure the location, which I use whenever I'm anywhere near my house, but it should be a little better about prompting users to use that.
rwoll 2 hours ago [-]
Strava (a running tracking app) provides two helpful controls you can set as your default:
1. “Hide the start and end points of activities that start at SPECIFIC addresses.”
2. “Hide start and end no matter where they happen.”
Then it can be useful to add your home/work/routine locations.
If iNaturalist doesn’t have a setting like that, it’s a nice approach — especially if it’s included as part of initial onboarding flow — so it helps people without needing to remember to make visibility choices each time.
deckar01 24 minutes ago [-]
Wait until you see what happens when you type your address into google earth.
There's an option to obscure the exact location of plants, but it's not obvious.
jmusall 1 hours ago [-]
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...
iNaturalist's computer vision model is actually trained on the community's own verified observations, creating a nice feedback loop. The current model (built on a vision transformer architecture) can suggest IDs for around 76,000 taxa, but it's retrained periodically as more research-grade observations come in. What's less well known is that their training dataset is publicly available on GitHub and has become a standard benchmark in fine-grained visual classification research, used in papers from Google, Meta, etc. The fact that a citizen science platform accidentally produced one of the most important biodiversity ML datasets is kind of remarkable.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
Similar category: Merlin Bird ID [1]. Uses audio to identify the birds around you.
Thanks for sharing this. I love Merlin but never knew how they got it to be so good. Blood, sweat, and tears - of course - as everything actually valuable and useful requires.
upcoming-sesame 2 hours ago [-]
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've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet connection to do the identification and sometimes that is dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)
I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.
tejtm 53 minutes ago [-]
birdnet pi or go run the model locally
with an option to push observations
back to Cornell
Requiring an internet connection for a nature app is absurd. As annoying as it is I get why a big tech company like Google fails at this sort of thing, many of their employees probably never leave a city and so the products always work well for them. But a nature app has no excuse, normal usage will get blocked by that all the time.
meta-meta 1 hours ago [-]
That's what Merlin is for but it's a ~450mb install. BirdNet is only a ~30MB install and birds are everywhere, so what's wrong with having an online option for most people who spend most of their time within range of a cel tower?
The funny thing is I got into birds because of the app. I hike alone often. Identifying the bird and then challenging myself to identify it correctly from memory going forward (before double checking with the app) is a fun game that draws one into the environment. Then, once you remember the bird (or, in my case, whatever nickname I came up with) you start learning and remembering facts about the bird.
ajkjk 3 hours ago [-]
Even if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite things I've ever watched.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
Best movie of the year hands down
two-sandwich 4 hours ago [-]
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!
justonceokay 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tagami 26 minutes ago [-]
I have a friend that works there.
They recently posted a few open positions:
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.
coalteddy 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Tech blogs or pointers would be great
jw_cook 3 hours ago [-]
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:
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.
skyberrys 4 hours ago [-]
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)
frontierkodiak 8 minutes ago [-]
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've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.
skyberrys 3 hours ago [-]
That's too bad, maybe I can upload it to iNaturalist then reference the entry there. I don't mind if it's duplicated, I just want to be able to improve the location data without sharing the improved location data so publicly.
Taipan_Enigma 3 hours ago [-]
Are their models considered to be the best or is there some competition? For plant identification, they blow every other free app I have tried out of the water. It also seems to return the genus of a plant rather than misidentify the species which I find impressive.
Yet they shelter under a 'Science' tax-break. It's duplicitous. They should publish their models and build process. If it's not available for replication, it's not science.
anotheryou 22 minutes ago [-]
how does it compare to obsidentify?
(same doxxing problem there)
does it allow to save observations without publishing? want a pokedeck
bluebarbet 3 hours ago [-]
Also: WhoBird. A decent bird ID app that has the merit of being FOSS and available on F-Droid.
lanfeust6 3 hours ago [-]
is there any FOSS app for plants?
Modified3019 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jw_cook 2 hours ago [-]
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.
iNaturalist is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if they released their models.
frontierkodiak 6 minutes ago [-]
See my other comment in this thread! I've got you covered; launching open models in ~1month. Happy to answer any questions!
4 hours ago [-]
gardnr 3 hours ago [-]
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.
preuceian 3 hours ago [-]
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?
jw_cook 3 hours ago [-]
Both iNaturalist and Observation.org publish observation data to GBIF:
My 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!
Fun to travel and "pokemon" some new local stuff too.
The iNaturalist app doesn‘t. It has more features, but Seek‘s former advantage „let me just the a photo and auto-identify“ is now in the iNaturalist main app, as well, so it is my default now.
Frustration shared.
I got 0/4 though on the easiest difficulty level. Feature request: a version where you have to guess the common name instead, I think that would still be fun.
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
The fact that this even exists is so sad. CORS is such an ill-conceived idea
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.
IIRC, the exact chain of events was: Invasive Species Observation posted -> a curator at the LA Natural History saw the post and notified the CDFA (Agriculture Inspectors) -> CDFA contacts iNat to get email address -> CDFA contacts my SO. I don't recall whether iNat had a built-in messaging service at the time (they do now).
Regarding endangered species, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife evidently joined iNaturalist, in part to enhance their data collection. They seem to be monitoring iNaturalist and contacting users who have relevant observations. They seem very sensitive to privacy concerns, and cooperation is voluntary. I'm thrilled a state agency is engaging the public in protecting our natural resources.
These state employees have indeed been proactive.
Like all people learn is "someone does in fact live at that address and they use this app"
1. “Hide the start and end points of activities that start at SPECIFIC addresses.” 2. “Hide start and end no matter where they happen.”
Then it can be useful to add your home/work/routine locations.
If iNaturalist doesn’t have a setting like that, it’s a nice approach — especially if it’s included as part of initial onboarding flow — so it helps people without needing to remember to make visibility choices each time.
https://youtu.be/xicsyakpIL4
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
[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.
https://www.birdweather.com/birdnetpi
https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go
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.
User Insights and Analytics Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/kwwnthztts
Technical Delivery Manager https://app.beapplied.com/apply/ppeyvinuw4
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.
Tech blogs or pointers would be great
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...
For client side rendering, deck.gl is quite good, also a newer library called lonboard from DevelopmentSeed.
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!
does it allow to save observations without publishing? want a pokedeck
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.
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
https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...
https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f6...