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Showing posts from July, 2020

Shazam for Nature

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Seek by iNaturalist The species identification app that iNaturalist has added to the market has been dubbed the Shazam for nature app. The app features live image recognition that draws from a massive database of information before even taking the photo. Once you take the picture it further analyzes its contents for better identification.  When opening the camera in the app and viewing a species it will quickly go through the taxonomic ranks of identification till it gets down to species. In some cases it has trouble identifying the species so it will give you the genus and species options that can help you identify it more specifically. If the app is having trouble identifying the species you can move the camera around to other angles to get more accurate images for identification. Once you make an accurate identification it pulls up a summary page of the organism. From here you can view more pictures, determine whether it's native or non-native, information about the species, a r

Using Web Soil Survey- USDA

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While listening to the tutorial and playing with the Web Soil Survey I was able to discover many helpful tools and capabilities of the map. You can tell this was created by someone who has used other platforms before and had very specific things they wanted to make sure it could do to make the users life easier. Having used several mapping platforms and natural resources based maps before, as well as trying to integrate other tools with each other this program is well thought out. Some of the properties I found most helpful from a basic user point of view: link- very helpful if you are working on a project and want to be able to reopen the same extents exporting to a different platform  navigating map and extents is relatively easy with only a basic explanation necessary Looking at this program from the point of view of someone who would use this for a study or in depth analysis the things I found interesting and helpful were: description of soil types and delineations are clear and pr