Goal of the tool: Automatically create some observations.
Niche it fills in the iNaturalist ecosystem: Smooth workflow.
Is there a commercial component, or do you plan into include one in the future? Are donations requested? (yes/no, explain): No, my web app is free.
What sort of data (if any) does your app collect from its users?: (see below)
Link to your iNaturalist profile: https://www.inaturalist.org/people/rickshory
Description: I have written a web app for vegetation surveys, and users are already manually copying some data to iNat. I would like to automate that, to save time.
Discussion questions or areas seeking feedback:
On the page:
https://www.inaturalist.org/oauth/app_owner_application
It says to submit an application to become an “app owner”, but it does not say how to do that.
I have written a webapp “VegNab”, mostly for my own use, but other field botanists are beginning to use it. It’s for mobile entry of vegetation survey data, efficiently and spell-checked.
Users typically know most of the species, but VegNab has a “placeholder” feature, for when a species is not known on-site. Data entry can go ahead, and the placeholder will be identified later.
Users are already putting these placeholders on iNat, for documentation and collaboration, as well as for iNat community ID. But it’s a duplication of effort. The internal form of a placeholder in VegNab closely corresponds to an iNat observation: digital photos, and some notes. A user has to repeat what he/she already did in VegNab to create the iNat observation.
I envision putting a “sync” function in VegNab which will create iNat observations from all a user’s placeholders. I have looked into how to do this: PKCE login, avoid creating duplicates, etc. VegNab would remember the iNat observation, and integrate it into the user’s known species data.
To try VegNab, if not on a phone, best to paste the following URL into an incognito tab of a desktop browser, the window set narrow to emulate a phone screen.
https://rickshory.github.io/vegnab-webapp/
On a phone, reload twice, to assure the cache is set. Then, it will work completely offline.
