Today iNaturalist released the Geomodel, which will be replacing the previous method used to weight and label taxa that are “Seen Nearby” in Computer Vision suggestions.
On the website (and soon in the mobile apps) you’ll see “Expected Nearby” rather than “Seen Nearby”, to make it clear that the label is based on a predictive model. Note that even if you see “Seen Nearby” in the iNaturalist mobile apps, the results are coming from the Geomodel now.
Please read the in-depth blog post. If you have any questions, please ask them on the blog post page to keep discussion in one place. This forum post is mostly just an announcement. :-)
As always thank you to everyone who’s contributed to iNat. This has been many months in the making and we’re excited to use the Geomodel to improve iNaturalist and Seek going forward.
(Oh, and the Geomodel is part of the latest update to the Computer Vision model, which was released today as well.)