April Wildflower Challenge

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website):
iOS

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
2.13.5

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) :

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

We are trying to do the April Wildflower Challenge. When we open Seek, we tap the “Continue Challenge” button, then “Open Camera”, then “Continue”, then identify a wildflower as usual. We identify a flower and everything seems to go as normal. We believe we are doing everything right and can’t imagine what we are doing wrong. With 426 successful observations in the app, you would think that I knew how to use this app by now. Yet, Seek continues to say “0 observed so far”. Is this Challenge not working? What could I possibly be doing wrong?

Rodney Pearson

We have identified several wildflowers and have them saved in Seek

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Hm, it was working for me as long as Seek could identify to species – if it only guessed a higher rank, like family, it didn’t count.

My experience is that seek never “counts” anything for the category “Subphylum Angiospermae.” You can identify a hundred flowering plants, and for some reason, they just don’t register. It’s happened to me in other (perpetually unfinished) challenges involving that category before. I’m so glad you brought this up!

We were definitely identifying the plants all the way down to species. Some were new species, and some we were asked whether we wanted to use the new photo or keep the old. I surely could be missing something, but it seemed to me it was just not working as far as giving credit for those plants.

I should add, we have recently linked Seek to iNaturalist, so for most of the plants we were also using the option to post them to iNaturalist. Just in case that was a problem, we also did several and did not post to iNaturalist. Having said that, it doesn’t seem like that posting should have been a problem because that question comes up AFTER identifying the species. Is it possible the linking is getting in the way?

Sorry it’s not working for you. I don’t think it’s the link to iNat – I have the same version of Seek and also a link to iNat and it worked for me. I’m running on Android, but that shouldn’t make a difference.
Can you give an example species or two that it didn’t give you credit for?

Also, if you can get it to happen again, you can try sending debug logs. Immediately after the problem, go to About and tap the version number.

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I am using the iOS version of Seek. We identified many wildflowers on Monday, including: Common Chickweed, Pacific Bleeding Heart, Large White Trillium, Azure Bluet, Lesser Periwinkle, Virginia Strawberry, Bulbous Buttercup, and Crane-fly Orchid (there are more but I’m thinking that is probably enough!). These are all listed as April 11 observations in Seek, but when I click the “Continue Challenge” button upon opening Seek, it says “0 observed so far”.

I will definitely send the debug logs tomorrow. I just identified a flower from a photo and sent those debug logs in case that helps, but I will do a new one tomorrow.

Thank you for looking into this. I am an iOS app developer myself, so I know how difficult it can be to track down things like this, but I also know that no developer wants their app to not work correctly!

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Hm, I can’t reproduce even with those exact species. Hopefully someone on staff can figure it out from the log files.
(To be clear, I used photos from the internet, not the actual plants, but that definitely shouldn’t make a difference.)

Hopefully. I also just id’d Ground-Ivy. Stored as an identified plant in Seek, but my phone still says “0 observed so far”. I rebooted my phone last night – that fixes so many computer problems – but no improvement so far. Thank you for pursuing this.

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Were all of these species that you recorded for the first time on April 11? For species to count towards challenges, they need to be both 1) observed after the date you started the challenge and 2) species you haven’t seen before.

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9 posts were split to a new topic: Seek asks to replace photo for newly-sighted species

I too would really like to be able to have new observations counted for “Angiospermae.” This bug has made it difficult to feel enthusiastic about starting new challenges.

We received another email about this today, regarding angiosperms and last June’s Conservation Challenge, but I still can’t replicate the issue. I started the Conservation Challenge today and when I added a new observation of an angiosperm it counted towards the project:

Works for both iOS and Android for me.