Aotearoa Species Classifier

An app for classifying species found in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is based on an artificial neural network model trained on 14991 species, including plants and animals, that can be found around New Zealand. It is possible to take images by camera or select images from local storage. The model runs locally, so no network connection is required to make classifications. The imagery used for training the artificial neural network is a snapshot of all research-grade observations from Aotearoa New Zealand available via the crowd-sourcing website iNaturalist. Improvements to the model will be possible primarily by retraining the model on a more recent snapshot. Users are encouraged to upload their observations to iNaturalist, particularly for species that do not currently have many observations made in Aotearoa New Zealand. To facilitate upload, it may be best to take photos outside the app, so that a photo can be uploaded to iNaturalist via a suitable app if appropriate. Note that the classifier does not know at all about species that were not represented in the snapshot of observations used for training. In particular, invasive species that are new to Aotearoa New Zealand or those for which iNaturalist did not have any observations from Aotearoa New Zealand when the model was trained will not be known to the model.