| | | | | Illustration by Emily Sabens/The Washington Post; iStock | | Come to my corner of California, and I'll introduce you to the yellow-faced bumblebee, a sprawling Chilean sea fig hugging the hillside, and the starbursts of Bermuda buttercups blooming in the dunes. I'm on a first-name basis with my wild neighbors, thanks to a new crop of wildlife identification apps powered by artificial intelligence. You should make their acquaintance, too. This week I looked into four apps that can help you. | |  | | People may have never been as divorced from nature as they are today. Humans across much of the industrialized world have become an indoor species: About 90 percent of our time is spent inside. But what technology has torn asunder, perhaps it can begin to mend. Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bees. | | For people who don't know the difference between a robin and a magpie, this new generation of naturalist apps is the Rosetta Stone to the natural world. Reestablishing relationships with your outdoor neighbors might not only transform your commute, it might change your life. | | There are more than a dozen apps online promising to help you identify the natural world, many of them paid. Don't bother. Four apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, meet all your ID needs free of charge. And every observation will advance scientific understanding of the natural world. | | The easiest to use is Seek. The app, an offshoot of iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, lets you shoot live video. The app identifies the taxonomy of plants instantly as you shoot. If it can't figure out the species, it will give you its best guess. Then there's iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet. In seconds, they typically return a ranked list of potential candidates with rich descriptions of each. The identification of the most common species is a slam dunk. For rarer ones, it's easy to compare your observation against those of others in the database. The apps' real superpower is the community around them: Millions of citizen scientists who can vet and confirm your observations. Finally, there's Merlin Bird ID, a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The app uses a phone's sensitive microphone to identify bird vocalizations in the sonic landscape around you, even painting a visual representation analogous to a musical score. Merlin has changed how I hear the world. I can now tune in to birdsong operas that had never entered my consciousness. | | Ultimately, the apps' greatest breakthrough may not be technological at all. It may be raising our awareness. We are nearly blind to entire categories of living creatures. While these plants and animals are our neighbors, we scarcely acknowledge their existence, let alone their right to exist. By naming my wild neighbors, I've found my perception of them went from grainy and unclear to powerful and familiar. This could reverse one of the great losses of the past century: our severed connection to the unique, wild character of where we live. | |  | | Did you know I read all your emails? Be part of the Climate Coach community. Write with clever ideas, bad jokes and ways I can make this newsletter better for you at climatecoach@washpost.com. | | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Climate Coach in your inbox every Tuesday and Thursday. | | See you on Thursday, Michael Coren, Climate Coach | | | | | | | | | |
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