iNaturalist | Hacker News Reader

iNaturalist

inaturalist.org

90 pointsbrudgers18 comments

It’s incredible how far along iNaturalist has come. I’ve been an active user in Hong Kong since before the Pokémon Go craze. I used to tell my coworkers in jest that I gotta catch them all. :P

Seriously, iNaturalist is sooo much more meaningful than stuff like Pokémon Go. If you have kids who want to play Pokémon Go, show them iNaturalist instead. It’s a great tool to teach kids about the environment and its evolution. Once you start getting into iNaturalist, you’ll start noticing trends of species getting more or less populous from year to year, and you’ll learn to identify bugs, plants, birds, etc, and you’ll gain a new appreciation of nature, even when you are in an urban setting.

People play Pokémon go because it’s Pokémon, not because you get to walk around and observe the world.

You’ve basically just said “eat vegetables, it’s the same mouth movements as eating candy!”

We are trying to do something similar (citizen science + AI) but for the acoustic data,our first model can identify manatee calls and mastication (chewing) sounds. https://manatee-chat-demo.appspot.com/

This app sounds like a great idea.

I had to do a number of silly school science projects with my daughter while she was growing up, things like a bridge made of toothpicks and glue. These projects, while not really serious science, were experiences we both remember now that she is an adult. One of the best projects was making a short video of the animal life that lived around a local lake.

This was a really fun afternoon and evening where we recorded insects, turtles, birds, and even bats. It was a really nice time to talk about natural science with my young daughter.

I remember my sibling using the app when we were going on a guided tour in some wetlands. Pretty cool app that democratizes sightings of plants and animals.

I actually learned what the app is about from your comment better than from the landing page. However I wonder... as a non-native speaker I totally understand the meaning of your comment, but I am curious if 'democratize' is the correct word in this context.

To me it somehow communicates that there is something systematic (maybe even unfair) restricting some people from learning about nature apart from their unwillingness to study the topic. I mean this in a neutral manner, no one can possibly study everything.

Because I see the word used quite frequently in other contexts, I wonder if my understanding of the word is in line with the 'accepted' interpretation.

It's mainly the difficulty of getting sufficient information to people to let them understand what they are seeing. Field guides are generally detailed but you need to have some identification skills and know how the field guide is organised. The general guides cannot provide sufficient coverage so you need one for birds, one for mushrooms, one for trees, one for flowers, etc. etc. A phone app solves a lot of that.

The additional advantage of phone app is that allows casual contact (assuming people are motivated enough to install it) so if someone comes across a flower or tree with fruit they have enough information to at least identify it and perhaps learn some more about it. That's a huge step forward compared to today.

Democratizing has also been my experience with eBird.org also which made it a lot easier to find out where to go birding and what species had been seen exactly where. Before you had to be involved in various inner circles which generally were not designed to be inner circles but it made dissemination of information slow and selective. eBird changed all that. It made it much easier to find out what had been seen and allowed a new generation of birders to get going (at least here in Portugal). It still has a long way to go so it's good to see that iNaturalist has thought about the social side.

Engagement is one thing I'd like to see solved in these applications. Wildlife films are spectacular experiences but it only distances people from nature as they show things that are only rarely seen. There would be a lot more people concerned about the planet if "contact" with nature was happening more often. Strangely enough this happened to a certain extent with "wildlife diaries" which appeared in local newspapers which at least conveyed a sense of "what is happening outside, sort of right now". If apps had wildlife challenges (this tree is flowering now, can you find it) and up to date news then it should be possible to get more people s' attention and more people taking positive action.

Many countries already have applications like this with databases ranging back into the eighties or even earlier, and are used both by professionals and others. And a lot of them. So unfortunately I don't see those people leaving their track record behind and swith, which is going to lead to uncovered areas in this application. Unless they can hook into each others databases?

The iPhone App shows other people's geotagged sightings on a map. Not just your own.

I'm aware, my point is rather that it does something which other apps also do already and did so for much longer, making me wonder if it's going to see any traction. E.g. iNaturalist shows me like 10 observations in the past month for my location. Obsmapp shows me hundreds for the last week.

I did not know about obsmap. A few months ago I came across iNaturalist looking for species information for the Salinas River National Wildlife Refuge in California. iNaturalist had a lot of information for that specific site as well as for Monterey County, CA in general.

Just now looking at Obsmap for the first time, I saw fewer observations for the Salinas River NWR and surrounding area. But it looked like the activity may be more broadly worldwide. It doesn't look like what I was looking for. That doesn't make Obsmap bad, just maybe less useful for me. Probably depends on where a person is observing.

Thanks for turning me on to it though. Maybe it will come in useful in my future.

Many of these databases export their data to https://www.gbif.org/. But there is some delay. The feed from Swedish Artportalen was weekly, when I looked into this some years ago.

Previous discussion, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831794

For a project that seems to be based around a mobile app it’s a shame that the site doesn’t seem to have a mobile version (at least not for me on iOS / Safari)

The iOS app can be found by searching the appStore for "iNaturalist." Android is probably similar, but I'm just guessing.

Sure, I can download the app but I'd prefer it if the website was easier to read on my mobile so I know if I actually want to spend the time downloading it, rather than having to zoom and to scroll to see what it actually is. I think they're reducing their uptake by not making it easier to figure out what it is.

Oh. The app isn’t like the website. It’s an app and takes advantage of geolocation and camera integration.

I don’t really find the website a great novice oriented UI design. But it’s been worth learning in my case because it has high information density. That’s more important because to me because it supplements my long term interests.

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