I also love the Seek app that they provide (maybe this overlaps with the linked app in functionality?). As someone who's grown fonder of Nature in general over the last decade but who has little actual knowledge of the regional flora and fauna, it's a great way to engage with the plants and little bugs in my garden (or others' while on walks and such).

Fun to travel and "pokemon" some new local stuff too.

It is a gem. There are all kinds of fun location/organism-specific tools you can put together with the public read-only data, and owlsnearme is a good example of that. I just used it to check my area and learned there are snowy owls nearby, which is new to me!

The iNat API certainly has some quirks and shortcomings, but in terms of usability it's uncommonly good compared to most biodiversity platforms. I maintain the python API client[1], which is used for data visualizations, doing useful things with your own observation data (which is how I got into it), Jupyter notebooks, Discord bots, and some research/education workflows.

[1] https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist

And I made this silly game. Name the beast, where you get a picture and try to guess (or know) the scientific name. https://name-the-beast.skabb.com

Incredible. 7 owls near me! Thank you both for this, love it very much.

My son is now a fan of your site, thanks for sharing !

I can hide my home-based observation locations, but others usually do not. People who post observations in my front yard cause other iNat users to visit. This hasn't been a problem in that there have been only a few additional visitors, and they are friendly. Still, I don't like my yard being publicized.

People who walk by the yard might tell their friends, but ordinary word-of-mouth can't be queried online. Not yet.

EDIT: We did have what turned out to be a significant invasive species observation. It was published in my SO's account with the location obscured. I looked up the species online and realized it might be a concern, so I killed it and put it in the freezer. In the meantime, the California Agricultural Inspectors got wind of it and contacted iNat to obtain the email address associated with the account. After making contact, they sent someone to pick up my specimen, and the later, 4 inspectors (yes, really, 3 inspectors and a supervisor) were sent to look for additional specimens. None were found.

Unrelated to this incident, I posted endangered species (not on our property) in my account, and iNat automatically obscures the location. Later on, I got an ~~email~~ message via iNat from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife asking for access to the precise locations, which I gladly provided.

Does this matter if my account is some random username about birds?

Like all people learn is "someone does in fact live at that address and they use this app"

Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of this, the default should be low precision location data with a random offset per item + random offset per user.

There's an option to obscure the exact location of plants, but it's not obvious.

Merlin is great for identifying birds, but I could never understand how to just post the information to the community for them to verify the observation. Compared to Seek / iNaturalist I find the uploading process complicated and I still have no idea how to do it.

I'm a big fan of Merlin and learning more about its development changed my perspective on software development! I wrote about that here: https://digitalseams.com/blog/what-birdsong-and-backends-can...

There's Merlin and then there's Birdnet too https://birdnet.cornell.edu/. Both by Cornell.

Aaand if you like birds, Listers documentary is a lot of fun https://youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo

This app sparked a kind of existential change for me, also during the pandemic. I realized taking these long walks around Seattle that I didn’t know almost any of the plants. The “ah ha” moment was that I realized at any point almost 50% of my visual field was dominated by things I didn’t even know the names of. As a curious engineer this is not acceptable.

So I would take walks and try to identify any plant I didn’t know. The first day I didn’t even make it around the block. Over the course of moths I got better and could go a few miles before spotting a (native) plant I had no idea about. Now I know when most flowers bloom, what’s wdible, what’s poisonous, what’s related, and it’s fun to share with other plant people too.

Seattle is such a beautiful place to learn about plant life, since it is so temperate the city is like a world tree museum. Almost any kind of tree that doesn’t prefer desert will grow here and people over the centuries have planted many unique and exotic varieties.

I don't know if it will work, but Pl@ntNet Identify (which I use often) seems to have an API: https://docs.plantnet.org/en/reference/api-plantnet/

I've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.

Points are rendered server-side, backed by Elasticsearch, and served as PNG tiles for each zoom level. Individual markers are only rendered for small sets. Some of the relevant source code:

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...

https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/blob/main/app/ass...

You may want to look into the PMTiles format and tippecanoe. It efficiently produces pyramidal XYZ tile overviews of vector data. Sometimes this is also done server side via the PostGIS asMVT ffunction, or Martin.

For client side rendering, deck.gl is quite good, also a newer library called lonboard from DevelopmentSeed.

iNaturalist would agree with you; they explicitly say[1] it's not meant to be the primary source for your photos. Users generally fall into a couple broad camps:

1. Mostly use the mobile app, and take photos and upload observations directly from there. Local photo collection either isn't a priority or is backed up by their phone's cloud sync.

2. Mostly use inaturalist.org via a desktop browser, with either a standalone digital camera or mobile photos synced to desktop. Local filesystem (hopefully plus backups) is the source of truth.

I have been working on a desktop application[2] with a long-term goal of full bidirectional sync, and a secondary goal of offline usage. The current feature set is fairly modest and read-only, though, focusing on organizing local photos using data from iNat.

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about

[2] https://github.com/pyinat/naturtag

is there any FOSS app for plants?

Both iNaturalist and Observation.org publish observation data to GBIF:

https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...

https://www.gbif.org/dataset/8a863029-f435-446a-821e-275f4f6...