iNaturalist

 iNaturalist is an app for identifying and keeping track of the living things you have encountered. Viking evidently has decided this is the app they will promote on all of its expedition trips. This is one of the apps I have explored because I thought apps of this type have potential value for students and classroom assignments (e.g., identify and capture images of the trees in your neighborhood). 

We attended a session preparing any interested passengers in the use of the app. Imagine a group of older, novice iPhone users and you can possibly imagine what it must be like to try to explain any unfamiliar app. Mixed in were a few of us interested in citizen science and how the AI in this specific app recognized specimens. I try not to be obnoxious, but I had not spent a lot of time with iNaturalist and I was interested in how it compared with other similar apps (e.g., PlantSnap). There is a specific feature that differentiates a first try at identification (the AI first does the best it can) from considering a sighting verified and I was interested how the verification process works. Did an expert go through and mark the images as verified that seemed highly probable? It turns out that the process is probably best described as crowd-sourced with different individuals entering opinions of the identity of public images and the app then making a decision when the overall inputs reach some criterion.

Someone in the group asked about use of the data and wondered if the observations could be filtered in different ways. For example, observation dates could be useful in tracking migration patterns. I know this is how Journey North works. Because the presenter was emphasizing bird identification, I was going to ask if she was familiar with Bird Buddy because it was a citizen science project that relied on photos and identifications collected from bird feeders, but I decided that would get the group off topic.

The presenter went on to describe the group feature of the app which allows participants in a group to submit images. Viking cruises has a group account collecting images from anyone on a Vikings cruise. Some images were from areas around the Great Lakes where we have camped. Anyway, the presenter wanted to demonstrate how you add a photo to this group collection and for some reason, possibly my good looks, she took a photo of me and submitted to the world wide group as an example of a human. I wish she would have given me more warning and I found have stopped slouching in my chair. Anyway, I now appear to be the only example of a human submitted by any member of the Viking group. I am still there today, but I have yet to be verified.