iNaturalist

https://www.inaturalist.org/

136•bookofjoe•1h ago

Comments

simonw•1h 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.

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%... )

andrewpedelty•1h 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•1h 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•55m ago

>Seek throws up a „please don‘t disturb nature“ modal at every single start that you need to click away.

Frustration shared.

throwanem•39m ago

So the modal is doing its job.

bluebarbet•30m 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•6m ago

That's great to know, I'll give it a shot for sure.

GorbachevyChase•1h 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•49m ago

I stopped using seek and just started using gemini…

Galanwe•52m ago

My son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !

jw_cook•34m 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.

[1] https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist

two-sandwich•1h 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!

daemonologist•1h ago

iNaturalist is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if they released their models.

JumpCrisscross•1h ago

Similar category: Merlin Bird ID [1]. Uses audio to identify the birds around you.

[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

derwiki•1h ago

Aaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo

JumpCrisscross•1h ago

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•57m ago

Even if you don't like birds... It's one of my favorite things I've ever watched.

bobbiechen•1h ago

I'm a big fan of Merlin and learning more about its development changed my perspective on software development! I wrote about that here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...

kiproping•10m ago

There's Merlin and then there's Birdnet too https://birdnet.cornell.edu/. Both by Cornell.

skyberrys•1h 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)

jw_cook•1h ago

I've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.

contingencies•57m ago

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.

Taipan_Enigma•38m 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.

jw_cook•29m ago

IMO it's best-in-class. The next best thing might be google's speciesnet: https://github.com/google/cameratrapai

skyberrys•7m 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.

Matumio•23m ago

I don't know if it will work, but Pl@ntNet Identify (which I use often) seems to have an API: https://docs.plantnet.org/en/reference/api-plantnet/

Beestie•56m ago

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.

ray__•42m 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.

lithocarpus•37m 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•23m 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.

whateveracct•30m 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__•15m 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).

RobotToaster•24m ago

There's an option to obscure the exact location of plants, but it's not obvious.

the_real_cher•30m ago

This is like pro spider league.

preuceian•30m 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•26m ago

Both iNaturalist and Observation.org publish observation data to GBIF:

https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...

https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f6...

coalteddy•29m 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

noahgolmant•22m ago

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.

jw_cook•8m 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:

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...

bluebarbet•26m ago

Also: WhoBird. A decent bird ID app that has the merit of being FOSS and available on F-Droid.

lanfeust6•9m ago

is there any FOSS app for plants?

butlike•17m ago

Ok the little infographic that shows "how it works" looks like the cloudflare warning when cloudflare can't connect to the host.

gardnr•14m 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.

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