I am learning to identify amphibians and reptiles. For my training, I examine a large number of images that contain pre-identified herps. With this training, I can help to identify other unidentified images of amphibians and reptiles. The process is similar to how children use flash cards, except I use tens of thousands of flash cards to learn. I'm already pretty good at identification, but I want to be VERY good, and to do that, I need more images in my training sets. My current goal is to have at least 250 images of each species of amphibian and reptile to learn from, and I may need more images in the future. Read on to find out how you can help me, and to try me out!
HerpMapper's collection of observation records is the primary source of training images for Fitch. Submitting your observations will help to make Fitch better at identifying amphibians and reptiles, and will also aide researchers and conservation groups with their work. Many species are hard to identify without knowing where in the world they came from. To keep Fitch accurate, only observations of wild amphibians and reptiles with a precise location should be submitted to HerpMapper.
If you have additional photos of herps already submitted to HerpMapper, you can add them to the existing records and help Fitch learn.
You can help improve and accelerate Fitch's training by selecting the area in an image that contains the amphibian or reptile. This is done by dragging a rectangle to fit around the animal; this way, Fitch doesn't have to waste time examining parts of the image that don't contain a herp. You can also help improve species identification by confirming or correcting the identity of the amphibian or reptile in the training images. When you're finished and click Submit, Fitch will open a new image for you to improve. Every image that you improve helps Fitch to improve!
Choose a file from your computer, and Fitch will try to identify it.
Send photos to Fitch on Twitter and Fitch will respond with an identification.