Ditch the binoculars, hand lens and hefty field guides! Now that we have powerful computers in our pockets combined with decent cameras and internet we can use apps to identify flora and fauna. I saw a hole in the Bucket today so am popping in a few plant and arthropod ID apps that I’ve encountered. I’ve not used them (yet) being fond of sitting on the ground hunched over teeny plant parts with my hand lens. But I’ve used Cornell’s Merlin bird ID App and it’s useful because my bird ID skills aren’t great. Merlin helps me narrow down my choices and then I can grab a hefty field guide for my region and dig in deeper.
The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Animals, weather, meteorites, climate, soil, plants, waters are all worthy additions to the Bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, your location. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. |
Leafsnap was developed by the Smithsonian Institute and two universities to identify trees by their leaves using technologies designed for facial recognition software.
Users of Leafsnap will not only be learning about the trees in their communities and on their hikes—they will also be contributing to science. As people use Leafsnap, the free mobile app automatically shares their images, species identifications and the tree’s location with a community of scientists. These scientists will use the information to map and monitor population growth and decline of trees nationwide.
[...] “Within a single species leaves can have quite diverse shapes, while leaves from different species are sometimes quite similar,” said Jacobs, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “So one of the main technical challenges in using leaves to identify plant species has been to find effective representations of their shape, which capture their most important characteristics.”
The Audubon Wildflower App goes beyond trees and also has a journal for recording sightings, geotracking, and share features. Their Insect and Spider App has similar features to those described for wildflowers.
Explore the wildflowers of North America with this essential field guide. Identify everything from asters to cactai, and hydrangea to verbena. Audubon Wildflowers—- a Field Guide to North American wildflowers includes thousands of photos, detailed range maps, in-depth descriptions, state-of-the art search functions and more.
Want to know whose stalking you out on the trail? There’s an app for that, too: My Nature Animal Tracks. It also includes scat so photo that shit!
Other apps developed by Audubon and others focus on reptiles and amphibians, wilderness trees, garden plants, pest insects and much more. This article links to 19 apps across different categories. There’s even a plant ID app, FlowerChecker, that isn’t a database but has real live botanists working to identify the plant images you photo — for a fee. No charge if no ID.
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