Goal of the tool: I built KnowKi to help people learn to recognize the wildlife around them by sight, and have a little fun doing it.
Niche it fills in the iNaturalist ecosystem: iNat and Seek are great for learning species out in the field, but I wanted a way for people to build up (and test) their knowledge on the days they can’t get outside, and I couldn’t find anything that really did that well, so I made KnowKi.
Lessons are built from research-grade observations recorded near you, most-recorded species first, so you start with the ones you’re most likely to run into. You can also take a “trip” to any country, U.S. national park or biodiversity hotspot. Spaced recall decides which species come back and when. A species becomes kin once you’ve recognized it in two different photos on two different days.
The name comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s proposal of ki and kin as pronouns for living beings, in place of “it” and “them.”
I also wanted the platform to encourage iNat use:
- Once you know 10 species, it shows which of them have been observed near you this month and nudges you to go find them.
- If you connect your username (public observations only, no sign-in), species you’ve observed get a “found in the wild” stamp.
- There’s a monthly Field Bingo card of in-season species near you, which you fill in by posting observations on iNat.
Is there a commercial component, or do you plan to include one in the future? Are donations requested? (yes/no, explain): No commercial component, and none planned. Many of the photos are CC BY-NC, so the app has to stay noncommercial: no ads, no sponsors, no paid features.
Donations: yes. There’s an optional Buy Me a Coffee link to help cover server/domain costs, and donating doesn’t unlock anything. If/when this gets a user base, I’ll try to be transparent about costs.
What sort of data (if any) does your app collect from its users?: Very little. There are no accounts (I may consider them someday), no analytics or ad SDKs, and no tracking. On the web, your progress stays in your browser.
To build lessons and dailies, the app sends my lesson server:
- a rounded location (about 1 km for a place you search for, about 11 km if you use your approximate location)
- a search radius and species group
- your answers
Place searches go through the server too.
The server only keeps anonymous daily totals (lessons started and finished, answers right and wrong). It doesn’t store IP addresses, answers or locations. If you connect an iNat username, it’s only used to check your public observations for that request, and it’s never stored.
Link to your iNaturalist profile: https://www.inaturalist.org/people/hommedeterre
Description: KnowKi is a free web app at https://knowki.app. An iPhone version is in the works. Your guide is Āki, a kiwi from Aotearoa.
- Learn: pick a place and a group (birds, mammals, plants, insects, herps, fish, or mollusks) and follow a path of six-species units: meet them, match them, practice, then a checkpoint. As a species gets familiar, the wrong answers get harder, using iNat’s similar-species data so the look-alikes are real ones.
- Play: a Daily with five species, easy to expert, in three editions (your neighborhood, your country and the world). Everyone in the same edition gets the same five that day, so you can compare scores with friends. There are also quiz and match games you can play outside of the learning path.
- Fieldbook: every species you’ve met, with your progress, a short Wikipedia intro, a range map (iNat’s Open Range Map Dataset) and a map of where observations were made.
- Trips: learn the species of any country, any U.S. national park or a biodiversity hotspot.
*notes: I’m hoping to engage an artist friend to create some original (human-drawn) artwork for this project in the medium-term to replace the AI-generated Āki images. And I’d like to make it accessible in more languages than just English (as of now, you can enable non-English common names in settings, but everything else is still in English).
How it uses iNaturalist: all species, photos and observations come from iNat through my own small server. It only uses research-grade, wild observations, and only CC0, CC BY and CC BY-NC photos. Photos of organisms marked as dead are left out. Each photo is credited appropriately.
Discussion questions / areas I’d love feedback on:
- Educators: would you find this useful with students? If yes, why? If no, what would make it more useful?
- Are there any other types of games/learning types that you would find helpful or fun?
- I haven’t added account functionality as of yet; one of the main benefits that would give would be that your progress would transfer across devices/browsers. Would folks find that to be useful and/or a necessary feature for you to want to continue using the platform?
- Generally, I’d welcome any user feedback. I want this to be fun and add to the iNat ecosystem.
