Shazam for Nature







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 range map, taxonomic breakdown, other observations nearby, and the seasonality of the species. The only fault I find with this summary page is the source where the summary is drawn from. The information is pulled from Wikipedia and is therefor not as reliable as I would prefer. 
There are also observation challenges that Seek provides to its users. This month they have the July 2020 River Challenge. For this specific challenge they encourage users to find 2 fish or amphibians, 3 aquatic bird species, and 1 mollusk. They also have achievement badges users can earn. The more you observe and the more badges you receive to rank up. This is a fun way to engage users to utilize the app more and encourage younger users to gain higher ranks by making more observations. 
Another factor that I really enjoy about this app is that since it is created by iNaturalist it links to the iNaturalist app if you have an account. Since I use both apps for identification all of my observations are uploaded to both apps to see track of and see in different ways. The great thing about the iNaturalist app is that the observations you collect can be verified by other users then become research grade data. Researchers and scientists can pull this data from the website and use it in their research and studies for citations. The Seek app has different features than the iNaturalist app other than the identification just by opening the camera. Also the layout is a bit more user friendly in my opinion. I use this app regularly and  my frequent use has encouraged my coworkers to use it as well. Working outside always presents us with new species or common species we would like to identify. Being able to identify them right away and learn some information about a species is extremely useful.

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