A team of scientists from Cornell Tech in collaboration with the California Institute of Technology and Cornel Lab of Ornithology has developed a special app that will allow birdwatchers recognize and learn more about the species of birds they observe.
The developers of the birdwatcher app explained that the user has to upload the photos of birds they have taken in order to learn more about the birds.
After the picture was uploaded into the app, the program tries to identify the species the bird belongs to using a specialized computer technology.
The next step would be that the user must answer a series of questions so that the birdwatcher app can identify the species of the bird after looking for them in its database.
All the possible answers come together with birdcalls that each species makes.
According to the website, the birdwatcher app is called Merlin Bird Identification and acts as an instructor for inexperienced birdwatchers, both beginning and intermediate.
Some of the questions that the users need to answer in order for the app to identify the bird include the size and the color of the bird.
Answering these questions will help narrow the search and the app will better identify the bird species from the users’ uploaded photos.
The developers said that the app uses takes its info from eBird and is equipped with an enormous database that includes more than 70 million bird images and sightings from all over the world.
The app shows the user a list of bird species that with info about the location they come from and the time the sighting occurred.
Also, the app has a list of photos based on the users’ descriptions of the birds.
The developers of the birdwatcher app explained that the most important questions that help the app to identify the bird species are about date and location.
The app’s creators said that it takes many years for a birdwatcher to accumulate the experience and be able to identify the species a bird belongs to according to the location and the date.
According to the researchers, in North America there are more than 400 species of birds that can be identified.
In order to create the app, the developers collected more than three million descriptions of birds. Some of them were gathered from the bird experts at the Cornell Lab, with the help of expert ornithologists from around the world.
Image Source: dailytimesgazette
