Hi everyone! Very recently, I discovered an amazing app called Seek. It lets you identify the animals, insects and plants around you! Seek by iNaturalist is a fun, safe and amazing way to engage not just kids, but anyone of any age in exploring local biodiversity in a half game, half learning environment. It also does not generate or share information with iNaturalist, but it does get information from iNaturalist. If you merely want to explore biodiversity nearby, it is a great way to learn about what you are seeing or what others have seen nearby.
To use the app, you simply have to take photos of the plants, animals, and insects you encounter. When starting there is a friendly reminder to be safe while gathering your photos. To reward you and make it fun, there are many badges to earn. There is a series of badges for number of observations you make. The app keeps count of what you’ve seen, how many species, and how many badges you have. There are also challenges that you can earn badges from. The badges and the challenges are the game part of it and encourage users to look for a variety of life.
The app uses the image recognition technology of iNaturalist. Once you take a picture, the app recognizes the species and adds it to your collection. A big drawback is that if the picture you take is not recognized, there is no way for you to enter it. Each species that is in your collection or that has been seen nearby will show up as a rectangle in a list. Clicking on the rectangle will open more information on the species: common and scientific name, native or introduced, threatened, endangered or neither, taxon, map, a graph of when sightings have been recorded, a blurb from wikipedia, and an observation count from iNaturalist.
Download Seek today to find out more about your environment!
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/seek-by-inaturalist/id1353224144