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TECHNOLOGY CORNER
Seek by iNaturalist By Kyle E. Harms, Louisiana State University
A Mobile App for Species Identifications in the Field
Visit inaturalist.org and inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app to learn more.
Plant identification in our southeastern U.S. biodiversity hotspot can be quite challenging. Many sites have dozens of grass species, oodles of forbs with basal leaf rosettes, and umpteen species of trifoliate legumes! Taxonomic keys, wellcurated botanical reference material, and the skills of expert botanists all remain just as valuable today as they were before we all carried around smartphones in our pockets. Even so, our smartphones now put the possibility of provisional plant identifications anywhere we roam. Several freely available plant identification mobile apps exist, but I want you to know about Seek by iNaturalist, which was released two years ago. A few months ago, I was introduced to the app on an outing with family and friends to The Nature Conservancy’s Abita Creek Flatwoods Preserve in southeastern Louisiana, a site I have often visited and am familiar with its species-rich groundcover. As we botanized, I noticed that my tech-savvy LSU colleague, Bret, was quickly pulling accurate species IDs from his phone. He said he had been using the app Seek for a few months and was pleased with its coverage across taxa wherever he had used it. We decided to challenge the app with a variety of plants, including the trunk of a longleaf pine (to which it responded Pinus). Of course, the app does better
when the phone’s camera can see more of the plant than just its stem. I was especially impressed when Bret’s phone nearly immediately recognized narrowleaf primrose-willow (Ludwigia linearis), with neither flowers nor fruits, as my faulty memory struggled to find a match for its strap-like cauline leaves from among all the various superficially similar species of Eupatorium, Euthamia, Liatris, and others that were hopelessly tangled in my brain. Seek represents a wonderfully useful confluence of big data, citizen science, and sophisticated computer technology. Seek is a product of iNaturalist - the natural history data-sharing and social networking platform - which has become a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and The National Geographic Society. These tools use machine learning and image recognition software to match new images to the observations that previous users have made with them. Similar to Wikipedia, these tools get better the more folks contribute their observations and expertise (i.e., the data grows and the recognition software improves). And, of course, their utility is not restricted to plants. These apps also give you a leg up for identifying insects, spiders, fungi, herps, etc.
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