I was just exploring street view on this bridge in the Tokyo metro area and came across this Gull, which made me wonder, is there an inat account or citizen science project out there that “observes” these?
Oh, and I do wonder what species of gull this is.
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There isn’t an iNat account for this streetview photos, it would be a copyright violation (the image belongs to Google). As to whether there is some sort of project for this elsewhere, I’m not sure.
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There is a facebook group for streetview birding:
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Welcome to the forum!
I’ve dreamed of some fancy collaboration between iNat and Google that would allow anyone to submit images from Streetview to an official Google iNat account, but I doubt that will ever happen haha.
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Google has their Lens image recognition tech. to address this particular use case, it would make more sense for Google to just integrate Lens into their Street View. i bet they would do it if you asked them. besides identifying interesting animals and plants in the Street View images, i bet Google could commercialize the integration by, say, offering to refer people to car manufacturer websites when you clicked on a cool-looking car, or that sort of thing.
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The automatic tell-me-what-this-is would be pretty cool, but I assume that wouldn’t involve collecting the biodiversity information together in a database.
The bird facebook group has found 1300 species of birds and 400 other animals. Those are pretty well documented on eBird etc. though. I’m curious about the potential value for roadside plants in remote tropical areas, or for invasive species tracking.
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I imagine so. Not to mention you couldn’t get an accurate date or time for the data unless google provided it.
you typically can get at least a month and year associated with a particular Street View image
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I can recall using dates on streetview and satellite view to be able to narrow down a date range in which a tree had been removed at our botanic gardens (Council couldn’t tell me when it happened!). Working out that species helped me identify fungi that were presumably associated with the decaying roots, however a fungi specialist was able to ID them just off the fruiting body in the observation, so wasn’t critical to the ID in this case.
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Putting the research into Research Grade. Lol
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On the gull, this one should be labelled ‘Gull’ as I think it is impossible to say whether it is a Common Gull or Vega Gull, or even Slaty-backed Gull. It is safe to say it is not Black-tailed Gull.
cheers,
Gerben
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It looks pretty big for common and light for slaty-backed, but it’s an unfortunate photo, there’re much better gull shots on street view.
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You are right it is too silvery grey for Slaty-backed. Safest bet then is ‘Large White-headed Gull’ Not very satisfying I would say.
cheers,
Gerben
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