Comment by olivierlacan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olivierlacan | Hacker News Reader

Odd to see one of the best native plant communicators referenced on HN but I'll use to opportunity to mention a side project I'd been delaying diving in for years and finally committed to recently if there are folks here who want to not only learn to identify crucial native flora (and fauna) but contribute to restoring local native plants that are critical to ecosystems.

So, mini show HN: https://indigene.app is a browser-only, offline & mobile-friendly, no account, no ads, open source tool to help you find native plants that would thrive exactly where you are. I've tried to make it as thoroughly sourced as possible but focus heavily on folks that have less experience with gardening and native plants in general.

I've been adding coverage to a handful of US and French ecoregions for now (what I know) and you can already do plant lookups by GPS, postal code, and ecoregion). The app will help you identify you spot, sun, soil, and specific ecosystem support goals (wildlife, birds, erosion or runoff control, growth) and offer a sortable list you can fine-tune with requirements (max height/width, no thorns, pet safe, spread, zero watering, etc.).

There's a lot more in there I've wanted for years like bloom windows, host species counts, dependent native wildlife, growth-over-time charts, propagation tips, and tons of sourced references that overlap with a lot of the resources Joey Santore and other native plant folks reference.

None of this replaces useful tools like iNaturalist whose excellent open API I use to show what native plants look like in Indigene, but hopefully it encourages folks who have the means and the time to start rebuilding local ecosystems we've neglected or actively destroyed.

PS: because I can't help it, the app has detailed release notes gendered from its changelog at https://indigene.app/release-notes/. It also takes privacy & safety very seriously: https://indigene.app/privacy

I'm a Visiting Scientist at UC Berkeley focusing on AI for ecology.

Always great to see fellow technologists in this space!

For the past few years I've maintained a free open source project called Ecodash (https://ecodash.ai) covering the world's native plants, with trait filters.

Code here: https://github.com/legel/ecodash

While I'm also an entrepreneur and *do* believe there is a lot of financial opportunity in this space, I also really just want to see ecosystems thrive.

Keep up the great work!

It’s so nice to know you’ve worked on this. I’m very curious what sources you used.

The most fun I had with Indigene was when I decided to add French ecoregions so my parents could use the app too. Most of the work is in this PR where I used a recently published study’s plant host species data to offer ecosystem value/services metrics since the Tallamy data doesn’t cover that: https://github.com/olivierlacan/indigene/pull/53

That stuff reignitated the kind of deep data hunt fever I haven’t had since my COVID Tracking Project days when I was finding random ArcGIS dashboards and extracting data from their JSON calls to find some reliable case data.

I’m bummed I didn’t find your project before. I kept looking for something when I moved from Florida to Washington after converting my entire yard there. Having to learn a whole new ecoregion was rough and it made me think the barrier should be drastically lower for people who aren’t as motivated.

On the financial opportunity side, I hoped for a while that there may be a way to align our best interest as a species (and our ecosystem) with what our modern societies value but the last decade has made it clear to me that neither governments nor private enterprise are capable to remain as focused as they need to be. Plus leveraging worldwide public-funded science to make a living seems a bit odd if I can instead use my engineering expertise to not require unnecessary waste of resources (servers, more LLM tokens, etc.) as the ecosystem rapidly degrades.

Thanks Olivier!

Very kind. Cool technical insights.

I agree 100% that learning ecoregions is too difficult. I believe that AI will help us to simulate ecosystems, just like physics equations simulate gravity.

The Natural Capital project from Stanford is impacting government policy globally, selling the argument that the financial value of ecosystems >> GDP.

In the private sector, I also see reasons to be optimistic. At Ecodash we found a 30% land value boost from biodiverse planting: https://ecodash.ai/biodiverse_gardens_roi.pdf

Please feel free to reach out (lance@ecological.dev), would love to chat further, explore collaboration.

Wow, this is a lovely tool, and it's clearly built with a lot of your own knowledge! I'm in New England and this has some great recs for my land.

One slight piece of feedback: it's pretty clear a lot of the text was output of AI. IME (and just _my_ E, of course), this detracts somewhat from the authority of the page, as it makes it seem more like it just came from a conversation with Claude, rather than from your knowledge filtered through building an app. Might be worth doing a couple of passes to tighten up and human-ize it a bit :). (since it's open source, I suppose I could always PR myself if you'd be open to it)

Thank you, it’s very explicitly the result of a relatively tight but fast TDD development process with Opus (4.8 & 5 mostly), a lot of cross-referencing with established sources (see https://indigene.app/sources), and my own 30 years of amateur gardening experience and roughly 10 years of Florida & PNW native planting & observation experience.

So I take this feedback to heart and just like with the (sourced & generated) French localization I’m working my way through validating everything. This is another benefit of the project being entirely public, you can see precisely in the repo what I did and didn’t think to do in order to ensure accuracy.

When it comes to prose & style, I’ve set some clear accessibility goals in the agent config, and I’ve rewritten some things but it can be hard to fight the needless verbosity of LLMs at times.

I would deeply appreciate if you took the time to send a PR for any kind of improvement or addition). Thanks in advance.

You've done a great job with the "how big does it get"/"what will it look like" SVG diagrams, those are incredibly helpful.

https://indigene.app/plants/symphyotrichum-subspicatum

https://indigene.app/plants/juncus-patens

Very helpful for choosing plants.

Some are pretty crude but it was one of the hardest things to determine when dealing with a fairly small garden. I agree they’ve been very useful before and sometimes after planting when it becomes clear you might have to relocate a plant.

The next thing I’d like to do is categorize some of the plants that are ideal for foundation planting (water management, vertical taproots) or curb islands (between sidewalks & streets).

Aw man, since you're sharing this on HN, you gotta cover California!

This is all the motivation I needed. I want to add more species to Florida first because this project finally came to life thanks to a visiting friend who still lives in Florida and struggles to find what to plant around her house.

Southern California is in. Took a bit longer than planned since as you'll see there were quite a few other improvements today: https://indigene.app/release-notes/0.24/

I'll move on to other parts soon, like the Bay Area.

I was looking for something like this in order to plant on a urban brownfield in my are that needs to be recultivated. I would like to add the plants for the area, as they are not in the database. Would you be able to recommend where I would be able to to find these? I did not find it in the readme. If there is a specific procedure to follow (i.e. referencing botanical texts), it would benefit from being added. Thanks!

I'm at https://indigene.app/regions/pnw (on Firefox on Android) and I'm frustrated because I can't find a map of the region's boundary. It's not at all clear to me how far north or south the region extends.

Fair criticism, this is based on EPA Level III/IV Ecoregions (cited in https://github.com/olivierlacan/indigene/blob/main/DATA_SOUR...) but I agree there should be a way to see it in a clear map.

Level III/IV Maps are here: https://www.epa.gov/eco-research/level-iii-and-iv-ecoregions...

At the very least I'll make sure each region page links to this given it's the source that determines what species are shown.

Fixed via https://github.com/olivierlacan/indigene/pull/105

Thanks again for the suggestion. It’ll take some refining but I also included nearby cities so it’s easier to get a sense of scale and proximity.

There are several branches of horticulture that require the same sort of systems thinking that makes one a good staff or principal engineer. Natives are one of them.

hell yeah, glad to see it, keep at it! this is the type of thing that i always figured software people would naturally tend to support, because it's just systems thinking. what better thing to do than to heal the ecosystems on which we depend?

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