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iNaturalist strikes out on its own
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xipho 3y agoPerhaps the most successful "natural" 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 < 2mm useful (at scale) we'd see research potential rocket.
- RaoulP 3y agoIf anyone has suggestions for a smartphone scope/lens, I'd be happy to hear them.
- sphars 3y agoThe Moment lenses and cases are probably the most well-received lenses for mobile devices. They have macro lenses as well: https://www.shopmoment.com/mobile/phone-lenses https://www.shopmoment.com/mobile/phone-lenses
- nemo 3y agoWith the adoption of multi-lens phone cameras allowing better zooming the general quality of insect observation photos has improved (some, there's still a lot of terrible photos). I actually started submitting a lot more insect observations in iNaturalist after I got an iPhone 12 and other folks on the forums have mentioned upgraded phone cameras have improved their observations and increased the range of what species they can submit. I'd love getting more zoom, there's micro-moths, lot of small aquatic inverts and things I'd be happy to be able to observe. Individuals do have some incentive to find new species over time to increase species counts, I'm up to 590 identified insect species and am trying to top my bird species count at 632. Improved cameras over time help improve model training and add species that are harder to get photos of as tech improves.
- s0rce 3y agoI submit most interesting insects I find, fun to learn about them. These are some of my favorites https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/155914507 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/155914507 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/136708118 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/136708118 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/132443637 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/132443637 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/169121886 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/169121886 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8443142 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8443142 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8445065 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/8445065 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/89986236 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/89986236.
- hetspookjee 3y agoWhat camera do you use? This one is so nicely zoomed https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/132443637 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/132443637 Almost looks like an image from an electron microscope the way the grass stands up.
- s0rce 3y agoJust an iphone, grass isn't real though.
- nemo 3y agoOh, tiger moth - nice! I have been working on my Lepidoptera for a while always love seeing those and sphinx moths are so cool. I'm up to six species of sphinx moths, the tessa sphinx is my favorite: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/176100012 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/176100012 Also that cottonwood dagger - whoah! I checked out your lifelist, you've found a lot of really interesting insect species, I'm in Austin and the differences are pretty dramatic and quite interesting. You can see my insect life list here: https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/steven_bach?view=tree&tree_mode=full_taxonomy&taxon_id=47158 https://www.inaturalist.org/lifelists/steven_bach?view=tree&...
- bentcorner 3y agoI'm a big fan of their "Seek" app and have used it a bunch. It has a similar "game" loop like Pokemon Go, but without any mtx, plus you learn a lot about your local ecosystems. If you have kids I highly recommend pulling out the app during a nature walk.
- ronyeh 3y agoIn case others have the same question I did... Microtransactions, sometimes abbreviated as mtx, are a business model where users can purchase virtual goods with micropayments within a game. Microtransactions are often used in free-to-play games to provide a revenue source for the developers.
- discreditable 3y agoI do the same thing with the iNatutalist app. I joke with my wife that I'm filling out my Pokedex. Currently at 164 species.
- qz_kb 3y agoHow 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.
- xipho 3y agohttps://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018/html/Van_Horn_The_INaturalist_Species_CVPR_2018_paper.html https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018/html/Van_Hor... https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/html/Van_Horn_Benchmarking_Representation_Learning_for_Natural_World_Image_Collections_CVPR_2021_paper.html https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2021/html/Van_Horn... Etc.
- EGreg 3y agoProbably because many people around the world participated in classifying what was posted? I am guessing. Please tell me if that is correct. How do they prevent false labels ?
- kej 3y agoAnecdotal, but I've gotten better results from iNaturalist than from the built in camera search on my phone, especially for insects.
- nemo 3y agoFor insects iNaturalist has the best trained models I know of, though of course not all insects are visually identifiable from a photo, especially beetles. It's actually incredibly good with birds as well. I post observations to iNaturalist daily and use the AI all the time for identification, even when I know the species the models usually figure it out as well and it's saves typing. I have used iNaturalist since 2014, the quality wasn't great initially but with the continued observations adding high quality annotations to the data their training improved pretty quickly, by 2017-18 it was already really good.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> especially beetles Dang. I was just hoping maybe I could identify the beetles that come out and crawl around my floor around dusk. I've been trying Seek on them, and when it identifies a species it says "Strawberry Seed Beetle", but that seems unlikely unless strawberry seed beetles are common household pests.
- burkaman 3y agoSeek is iNaturalist. If you want, after Seek identifies it you can hit a button to post to the iNaturalist website, and then human users will review and add their own identification.
- nemo 3y agoJ.B.S. Haldane joked that if some god or divine being had actually created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an "inordinate fondness for beetles." They're incredibly diverse, this article has a nice table that sums things up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_biodiversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_biodiversity There's ~64.000 mammal species total, insects clock in at ~1,000,000. Of insects Coleoptera, the beetles, are estimated at 360-400k species. There's about 2,000,000 species in Animalia total and a bit less than a quarter are beetles. If you use iNaturalist it's more helpful on that count than Seek since some beetles are more identifiable than others, and there are entomologists who might be able to help confirm some ids, I've had luck with a number of ground beetles and some other species.
- llbeansandrice 3y agoI'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've taken. I'm sure it'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.
- cdepman 3y agoGreat 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.
- chelmzy 3y agoIf 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/post locations.
- neilv 3y agoHopefully they'll get the app into F-Droid.
- sphars 3y agoOld thread, but looks like due to non-FOSS dependencies, it's not likely to happen: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/issues/1048#issuecomment-848933787 https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/issues/104...
- manicennui 3y agoI'm so glad this happened and they weren't acquired by some shitty tech company.
- wetpaws 3y ago[dead]
- troymc 3y agoMost (or all?) of iNaturalist's code is open source (typically MIT), see https://github.com/inaturalist https://github.com/inaturalist A lot of iNaturalist data is open data, see https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist-open-data https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist-open-data (It'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.)
- geokon 3y agoIn case anyone else is wondering why it's not on Fdroid: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/issues/654 https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/issues/654 (tldr: uses Google Maps and analytics)
- CameronNemo 3y agoYou can download it from their github apparently. I just limp along with aurora, though.
- sundarurfriend 3y agoI wonder if the IzzyOnDroid repository [1] (for F-Droid) will accept them. Their inclusion policy is "slightly less strict than F-Droid’s" in their words, but reading it [2] doesn't immediately clarify to me if this one would be allowed or not. [1] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info [2] https://gitlab.com/IzzyOnDroid/repo/#what-are-the-requirements-an-app-must-meet-to-be-included-with-the-repo https://gitlab.com/IzzyOnDroid/repo/#what-are-the-requiremen...
- jw_cook 3y agoYou can also get all research-grade observation data from a DarwinCore archive[1] that's updated monthly and exported to GBIF[2]. They also have a pretty good API[3], and if you happen to want to use that in a python application or script, I maintain a client library[4] for it. [1]: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/developers [2]: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7 https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425... [3]: https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/ https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/docs/ [4]: https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoGood on ‘em! Great service, and great app.
- sphars 3y agoHas anyone used PlantNet's app[0] and compared accuracy to iNaturalist? Been using the former and it seems to identify successfully, though I can't say I've used to identify more "exotic" fauna. Might give iNaturalist a try. [0]: https://identify.plantnet.org/ https://identify.plantnet.org/
- nemo 3y agoI haven't used PlantNet though I've been working on learning plant identification/taxonomy and have been using iNaturalist. Their models are limited by inputs, if you've got a wild angiosperm that's flowering it's pretty good. With human cultivars, even with flowers it's not always great, though no shade there, that's what I'd expect for visually trained models that focus on plants in the wild. If you aim it at a leaf there's not enough visual data to categorize, if you aim it at a full plant it's so-so. I mostly stick to flowering plants and have an easy time.
- da39a3ee 3y agoI’ve been using PlantNet over iNaturalist. One reason is that PlantNet gives confidence scores for identification. In general PN seems very good for European plants.
- burkaman 3y agoI try PlantNet when Seek can't identify something. It often feels more successful because it always gives a list of possibilities, but when the top answer is like 40% probable I don't actually know if it's doing any better than Seek. Downsides are that it requires service, and obviously it doesn't work for animals. Seek works perfectly in the middle of the wilderness with zero service, it always feels incredible.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis 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. Very positive to see
- Evidlo 3y agoAre there any apks available outside of the Play store?
- Evidlo 3y agoSeems like there are apks on the Github repo: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/releases https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/releases
- j7ake 3y agoWhat’s the model for them decide when to say a new species has been found, rather than just a variant of a known species? 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.
- ry167 3y agoLike a lot of biology, it’s complicated and often you need multiple forms of evidence to support a species classification if the viable offspring (biological species concept) doesn’t suit. So there are lots of different models for different types of organisms. And some reproduce asexually so reproductive compatibility would never be enough. Two simple options are evolutionary lineage (effectively genetic distance) or physical characteristics (morphology): https://bio.libretexts.org/Courses/University_of_California_Davis/BIS_2B%3A_Introduction_to_Biology_-_Ecology_and_Evolution/02%3A_Biodiversity/2.01%3A_Species_Concepts https://bio.libretexts.org/Courses/University_of_California_...
- singingfish 3y agoI'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/ambiguous/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.
- tomrandle 3y agoI 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. I’ve had less success with trees but it’s still pretty good. The focus on images is a bit iffy. Usually I take the photo using the phones native camera app to overcome.