A MOBILE APP FOR AI-ASSISTED SPECIES IDENTIFICATION AND NATURAL HISTORY OF INDIAN BUTTERFLIES
You can download the app for Android phones from this website, here.
It will be made available on Google Play store and the iOS version on Apple App Store in due course.
The iButterfly Explorer mobile app will help take your enjoyment of watching Indian butterflies in the field to the next level. It is an authoritative field guide for species identification and natural history of Indian butterflies. The app offers AI-assisted species identification, and serves as a mobile-friendly, offline companion to the Butterflies of India website (https://www.ifoundbutterflies.org), from which it draws data.
The project is driven by an integrated professional-amateur scientific community that aggregates big data on Indian butterflies with the goals of: (a) providing helpful resources and guidance to watch and enjoy butterflies, and (b) studying ecological trends. The platform is also used extensively for educational and outreach activities, so it promotes the enjoyment, research and conservation of biodiversity.
It is a home-grown citizen science platform, custom-made for Indian biodiversity, hosted in a leading national research institution, and supported by a consortium of government and private non-profit agencies.
Prominent Features:
- Easy-to-use, richly illustrated mobile app for field identification of species, aided by a rich array of peer-reviewed reference images
- Easy-to-use, highly accurate AI-assisted identification of species using your photographs
- Online as well as offline functionality, facilitating use in urban greeneries and remote field locations alike
- Useful for everyone, from nature lovers and naturalists to citizen scientists and field researchers
- It is completely free. It has no inbuilt ads, and your data and personal information will not be sold or shared with any other platform or company for a for-profit or non-profit purposes.
- You control the use of your data by the larger community by choosing an appropriate copyright license. You can choose to either:
(a) keep the data generated using this mobile app as completely copyrighted for personal use; that is, not share the data with others;
(b) make the data available to others immediately for use under a creative commons license, or
(c) make the data available to others under a creative commons license in a phased manner, for example under a 3-year or 5-year embargo, if you want to publish your results before you make the data available to others. The last option is suitable for those who are working towards their Masters or PhD theses, or working on a funded project with specific restrictions on data sharing.
Read the associated full statements on data privacy and data sharing /data-privacy] at the linked pages.