Back in last year's blog post "Ready to go live with What's Invasive!" I wrote about a smart phone app called What's Invasive!, an application used for mapping invasive plants.
The makers of What's Invasive! have teamed with Calflora to make the Calflora Observer Observer smart phone application with the purpose of making observations of wild plants, including photos, on your Android or iPhone. It's a free download and I'll be firing it up soon. Whereas What's Invasive relied on user- or community-defined plant lists, Observer allows reporting of any plant.
This application makes it easy for you to report the species name, date, and location of over 10,000 California native and non-native plant taxa. You can also add a photograph to a report, and share it with others later to confirm identification. Your reports are transmitted wirelessly to the Calflora database, where you can edit them and see them on a map.
To use the application, you need to register as a contributor. When you upload observations from your phone, they go into the database in an unpublished state. You can use the My Observations application to edit your observations, and when they are ready, publish them so that they are visible to other Calflora users.
This type of map is useful for wildlands and green space management. Detailed iPhone instructions for use are available.
I used the app last night and found that I was not able to sign in through the app using my existing account until I'd signed in to Calflora via a web interface and edited my account. They have added some additional agreements since I joined Calflora that pertain to uploading information and won't let you sign on through the app until you've updated your (older) existing account.
ReplyDeleteI hope the barriers to signing into this account get dissolved, because it sounds like an excellent idea, one that could save a lot of people some heartbreak!
ReplyDelete