This App Can Help You Identify The Mysterious Plants And Animals You Spot While Hiking

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Ever wonder what those pretty wildflowers are on the side of your favorite hiking trail? Well, there’s now an app for that.

Seek by iNaturalist is a new app created by a nature-loving social media network that crowdsources information on the flora and fauna in your area. There are more than 30,000 species logged into the iNaturalist database.

It’s basically Shazam for nature. You know, the app where you can play a bit of a song that you wanna look up later and find out the title. Or if you could go, “Hey Siri, what’s this leaf?” That’s Seek.

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Here’s how it all works. You go out trekking and spot a furry little creature that you want to learn more about so you can tell all your friends you saw a marmot/prairie dog/weasel. You snap a photo of the animal (or plant) and Seek goes to work. The app analyzes its database using artificial intelligence to find a match. Once the AI figures out what species you’ve spotted, you’ll get sent information from Wikipedia all about it.

According to the reviews, there are a few kinks to work out in the interface, but we love the idea of knowing a little bit more about the natural wildlife we encounter when exploring.

And sure, there are some kiddie functions, like the way you can get badges for every new species you see out in the wild. It’s kind of like Pokémon Go for nature — you gotta collect ’em all. But aren’t we all just giant children at heart when we go outside and play anyway?

[h/t Business Insider]