Tag Archives: plants

My super power⤴

from

During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

There’s two apps on my phone that I really like, and use a lot. The first is Merlin, the app from Cornell that helps people to identify birds. The second is Pl@ntNet, a free app that helps people to identify plants. They are both great, and thanks to Merlin I am getting better at guessing which bird I am hearing as I am out walking with my OH. I’m better at plants, but still appreciate having something to check when I’m not quite sure, and again it’s adding to my enjoyment of my walks. The problem is that both depend on having an internet connection, and quite often I don’t have one while out and about in rural Scotland.

So the super power that I’d like is the power to identify any flora or fauna, by sight and sound for birds, and to always be right. Here’s a coot I saw earlier – no need for Merlin to help me to know what this is, but I wish I’d had my phone out to record it shouting as it swam towards me.

Coot
Coot flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Liked: Pl@ntNet is the world’s best social network⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Liked Pl@ntNet is the world’s best social network by Michael J. Coren (Quartz)
The only that will make you feel better every time you use it.

Pl@ntNet is the world’s best social network is an interesting article and leads to a useful looking app.

Pl@ntNet is a plant identifier that combines algorithmic and social tools to identify plants.

An algorithm matches the digital image against a massive plant database and presents its best guesses as to what type of plant it is. The user who submitted the original image picks from a list of the most likely candidates, and ranks the probability the image is a match on a five-star scale. The community then vets each image, validating the identification or suggesting a new one.

The post has lots of interesting angles on the possible future of social networks, the indieweb and a nice personal touch. Highly recommended.

Last week I crowd sourced a flower identification, I ran the same image through Pl@ntNet this morning and had confirmation of the conclusion ‘we’ had reached1.

I made a couple more tests on the app and it seems to work really well. My one problem was that submitting photos uses the location you are at at the time of submission, not where I took the image (as far as I can see). Often I want to take a picture and bring it home to identify. I don’t want to give the impression that a Scottish hill flower is at home in Glasgow city! I can of course just id flowers without uploading them but the organisation wants people to add to the collection in the name of citizen science.

I’d recommend the app itself too, it seems to work very well, could be useful for outdoor learning and Pl@ntNet’s practices and principles sound great: open and thoughtful.

fn1. It took me a long time to get to the obvious, Wood Sorrel, as I found them half way up a mountain and couldn’t see the giveaway leaves. ↩