what is your opinion on pic related? are there alternatives that are better? are there analog alternatives that are better?
inaturalist, flora/fauna identifying apps
what is your opinion on pic related? are there alternatives that are better? are there analog alternatives that are better?
Basic. Does it's job well. There are certain annoying people you can encounter like you'd expect but the site as an ID tool is respectable and I've had few issues. No idea on any alternatives. Nothing analog could compare unless you want to go device free.
It does the job
Not well
If you live in the Pacific Northwest they're pretty shit. Plant identification books are better in every way.
>Nothing analog could
could
Stop giving advice about things you obviously know nothing about.
Give me a book with an ai that can automatically give a damn good guess on what you want to ID removing half the work you need to do.
>Learning how to not need the book or the robot to identify plants in your area is hard*.
*for you. I regularly read reigonal plant books when I'm not in the field because i actually like learning about plants.
Still less convenient.
>convenience is the only way something can be useful
?
If you're serious about plant ID you should be reading books/pdfs anyway, if you get a grasp on your local dominant plant families and work down from there you can ID 80% of whats out there (at least to a genus) without an app
Flowers are the biggest giveaway for pretty much anything. Start learning your -aceae's
To say something purely negative though it feels clunky to use in a few ways. Mobile app is drag and drop with simple useful editing tools. You can plop several photos of what you want ID'd, view them in app and select which one is the best for the computer vision to tag and if that fails actual people eventually. But it's not without technical flaws and you can encounter several issues with saving and syncing observations from my experience on Android. PC is far worse though. They streamlined mobile years ago but none of that ended up in desktop. Dealing with exported digital camera photos has made me stop caring to use inat unless I really need an id and in that case a smartphone photo will do nine times out of ten.
It's good for stalking nerdy ecologist girls
Gf uses it. I dont like it
I only use it because my wife gets jealous when I get more research grade observations than her.
inat is more useful for researching a destination youre going to, seeing what species exist there, so that you can learn how to identify them yourself in the field. the photo identifying shit is unreliable and likely to get you fricked up
>the photo identifying shit is unreliable and likely to get you fricked up
this lmao
inaturalist is only good for finding foraging spots where idiots have uploaded their locations online
Its ID tool is useful. Much of the time it's good, but it should be used more as a guide rather than something to rely on. It's often wrong. But as long as you have some knowledge of the flora/fauna and some common sense you can usually tell when it makes a mistake. It's no replacement for taxonomic keys.
There are almost a dozen dandelion lookalikes, a dozen fern types, almost a hundred types of violets and two dozen types of wild peas where I live.
The software ID is awful around these parts.
Dandelions (Taraxacum sp.) are essentially impossible to ID to species in the field anyway, that genus has very complicated genetics and taxonomy. Even keys won't really help you there, let alone computer vision.
It's true that the iNaturalist computer vision is not good at violets (Viola sp.), but the iNaturalist community itself is pretty good at violets, because given the right photos, violets can usually be keyed out to species.
Same for ferns and peas - where the computer vision is lacking, you can usually find an expert on the site who will weigh in and provide an ID, though it might take a while depending on taxon. Birds get a community ID almost immediately for example, plants are slower.
Of course this all varies by geography. If you live somewhere without a lot of data, the computer vision won't be as helpful.
I can tell the dandelions apart. Wall lettuce, Aparagidium(probably spelled that wrong), cats ear, wall lettuce, nipplewart...etcc., it's not actually that hard...
unless
you're a robot
;]
I've only heard about, and used, PlantNet. Works well for me but of course sometimes the photo ID is only "sure" to 10% or so. But then it has all the reference photos on display, as well as links to tons of sites including Wikipedia, so you can get a good idea anyway. I don't use it for life-or-death "can I eat this" situations.
Merlin bird ID. I use the song ID feature almost exclusively.
Can it differentiate a Robin and a Grosbeak?
I love iNaturalist. The ID software is not always the most reliable (better for some taxa than others) but it can be a good starting point for more research if you're stumped. Community IDs can be really helpful. Like others have said, it's good for foraging. And I like to just check out what's been posted in my area lately. Plus it's a good way to aggregate the cool things you've seen.
If you love plant ID you should already be thumbing through your native guidebook. If you "get stumped" you need to go to the section you think it should be in (or something similar) and if it isn't there expand your search (in the guidebook).
The robot is for people who don't want to learn they just want the answer.
I'm actually not really interested in plants, I've used it for plant ID maybe two or three times. I mostly use it for fungus and arthropod ID, the former of which I primarily rely on guidebooks for. Personally I find that the ID software helps me learn a lot, but I definitely do see people being very lazy with it.
🙁
for me its Merlin
Thanks for the free foraging spots, suckers.
Its pretty great, my phone's storage is now full of plant galls and spider webs. It can be annoyingly slow to load sometimes and if you don't make a good enough guess on something you don't know some people will ID your observation with the widest possible classification and expect upcummies for it.