I was looking for an app that was free, had no advertising, and for which favorable reviews were available on line. In December 2018 I settled on PlantNet and worked with the app over the next three months. In the week ahead of my planned deployment of the app PlantNet updated and converted all of my observations to “invalid observations” for reasons I knew not. Over the next few days I tried to determine what was occurring, but could not. I started looking for an alternate and found that iNaturalist met my criterion. I had doubts however that an app which was designed to handle all flora and fauna could possibly have the identification skill of a dedicated plant app. Thirty minutes before my planned app class I thought I would give the app a try. I took a single picture of Sphagneticola trilobata, an invasive plant here. iNaturalist listed the flower as the top hit. I was instantly sold on iNaturalist. With a single observation in iNaturalist, and many more in PlantNet, I suggested to the class that they could try using either app. I wrote of this first day in my blog.
The reason for the long story is to provide background to how I arrived at using iNaturalist in a classroom with only 30 minutes and one observation worth of experience. This would lead to a number of errors in usage by my students which I would work on cleaning up post hoc. By the following week I had decided to never again use PlantNet in class and to use iNaturalist in the future. This too I wrote up in my blog. The blog covers the reasons why I abandoned use of PlantNet.
Nothing more than Google searches for reviews and Google Play store user reviews of the apps.
Not directly influential: the course that I teach is an ethnobotany course, we are often identifying cultivated/captive plants that are used by the islanders. I designed the curriculum with the mentoring of Dr. Michael Balick at the New York Botanic Garden.
Introduce students to the use of technology in identifying plants. I am also hopeful some might become interested in using the app beyond the class. My students come from dozens of different islands scattered across the western Pacific ocean, they have the opportunity to document flora and fauna in places where iNaturalist has not been used.
The students were excited to use the app and produced a number of observations, primarily captive/cultivated observations. The second blog article noted above reported on the results.
Perhaps the most egregious error in usage was my own ignorance of the captive/cultivated flag, a result of having been a 30 minute user prior to deploying, which in turn was a result of the sudden odd behavior of the app I originally planned to use and had experience using. As with any smartphone app, anyone can download and use the app, oftentimes without any clue that there are community norms surrounding the use of the app. New user restrictions are perhaps an appropriate way to ensure community norms are learned and observed, but the restrictions being proposed in another thread would not have slowed me down that day from having the students experiment with iNaturalist.
I do now worry about the abandoned accounts issue, I cannot assure that my students will continue to use iNaturalist, quite frankly many will not. But I also know that the student account option is a closed issue. I will continue to watch Seek and see if this evolves to being a useful tool for use in a collegiate level course.