Seek - new functionality lets users post to iNaturalist
Ever since the first version of Seek was released in March 2018, people have been asking if their observations will contribute to citizen science or be used to improve the computer vision model. Now, they can!
As of today, Seek users can post to iNaturalist. To make this happen, in Seek you can:
- Create an iNaturalist account or log in with an existing iNaturalist account
- Create an account for a child under the age of 13 (with a parent or guardian’s permission)
- Optionally post to iNaturalist at the time of making an observation. This is a simple, one-way method to get it to iNaturalist, with limited functionality.
Observations that have been created from Seek can be found here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?oauth_application_id=333&place_id=any&subview=grid
You will need to update Seek to access this this new functionality.
Comments
Very nice, this will be great for kids that want(ed) to contribute. Congratulations, iNat team :)
Great. This solves the issue that "Seek" was locally seen as an alternative platform to iNaturalist. As an added iNat functionality for a niche market, this makes it far easier to promote ...
If observations from Seek are identified on iNaturalist, does it update the Seek listing for that user?
Not with this release but I believe that’s high on the priority list
If any examples needed to be given, cases like this would be relevant: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/26207752#activity_identification_57359019
(and many more)
Great!
Ohhhh. I do not feel good about this.
@bennypoo if you have concerns, it would be helpful if you described what they were.
Where to download the official seek APK (for those of us, who are not using the google-store)?
Will Seek users see the comments shared by iNaturalist community? e.g. hints on combining duplicate entries.
@tiwane, does Seek still rely exclusively on the AI for identifications? This is my chief concern. The concept of children populating the data on iNaturalist is my other concern. It would seem to hasten the decline of data quality available from iNaturalist. My fear for the last year or so has always been that a sharp decline in data quality just as the platform is gaining its legs would result in large-scale abandonment of that data. In years past, iNaturalist represented a new, extremely useful, and underutilized resource that had more potential uses than anyone could even conceive of at the time. The data quality was unusually high, to boot. Many of the errors were of the type found in other sources from time to time as well.
My fear is that if this incredible research tool serves primarily as a storage location for heaps of low-quality data, it will lose large portions of its utility to researchers. This will happen if the data quantity exceeds efforts to curate it.
I was wondering about that too. There are a lot of misIDs. It may be best to have a manual way to vet which observations go to iNat.
the app seems to make a great job in the identification of plants! love it!
@tiwane, another BIG issue I have with posting Seek observations to iNaturalist is that Seek doesn't provide an option to mark an organism as captive. Since many of these organisms are plants, how are curators on iNat to know if the organism is cultivated or not?
@bennypoo the Seek observation form does have a field for captive/cultivated
Thank you, @loarie. That assuages one of my many fears.
@bennypoo the image above has a screenshot of the submission screen.
I realize this thread is a year old but I had a couple specific questions regarding interaction between seek and iNat.
1) One issue with Seek is when you take photos through the app it strips out location and date data (in other words, in my photo roll the photos aren’t associated with GPS coordinates or date and time). So when I manually try to upload those photos to inaturalist later that information is missing and is time consuming to add back in for each photo. Is that going to be fixed in seek?
2) secondly (and related), many times I’m using Seek when I don’t have cellular or Internet access. I can’t see a way to push seek observations over to iNaturalist after the fact. Is this something that might be addressed in the future? It seems to me I have to submit them manually later, which brings me back to problem number one with missing data.
@desertbrooks if you've given the app permissions to use your location, photos taken with the camera should have dates/location. If you think there's a bug please email help@inaturalist.org with steps to reproduce. You can currently only post seek obs to iNat as you make them, not later on.
Thanks Loarie - I have it set to "While using app". I'll send an email to help@. Hopefully they also have an answer to my second question regarding submitting Seek sightings to iNat after the fact.
I should clarify, photos made in the iOS version of Seek do not get saved to your phone with GPS data.
@desertbrooks sorry for misunderstanding your question 1. Tony is correct, if you create a photo/observation with the iOS Seek app while the observation created in Seek will have a location, the photo saved to your camera roll will not.
Thanks both. I thought not. Is this going to be changed? It's a serious disincentive to use Seek, especially if I can't upload sightings directly from seek to iNaturalist after the fact (and don't have connectivity to do it right away).
@desertbrooks definitely functionality we'd like to add, but there are some technical hurdles with the iOS implementation.
Just started using Seek today and I was bummed to see there wasn't a way to port my observations over into iNat after the fact. I understand concerns around maintaining data quality etc and so not automatically posting all Seek observations to iNat makes sense, but if I have a linked account and have just gotten back from the field it would be great to be able to select observations from Seek and have them sent to my linked iNat account as well. I hope this can be implemented soon (and I wouldn't mind an uneven roll-out to android first :P ) Thanks!
I'm also a new user & can't find a way to post Seek observations to iNat after the fact. This would be especially helpful in areas with marginal signal (most of my farm).
I'm a new user to Seek and also iNaturalist. While I am still getting familiar with both apps I am enjoying them both. I agree with a number of other comments on here that it would be great if Seek observations could be uploaded to iNaturalist at a later time. Perhaps the best option is to limit that functionality to those with an iNaturalist account. I understand challenges exist with iOS devices, but as a long-term Android I am quite happy to beta-test an enhanced Android Seek app. And as an experienced IT Analyst familiar with software requirements and UAT testing I come with a value add. :-)
Add a Comment