Hey there @jacqvon! I'm the maker of Fieldguide. As an amateur malacologist and conchologist (shell collector) I found it challenging to stay current on everything mollusks - new field guides / compendiums tend to go out of print after one or two editions, not to mention that they can be quite expensive and heavy/bulky to carry around! These books hold a treasure trove of information that feels locked up on a dusty library shelf somewhere. Just like how Wikipedia reimagined the encyclopedia, Pinterest the scrapbook, Facebook the phonebook (and much more)...I wondered what it might be like to design a digital spiritual successor of the field guide. When you have no page limit, there's no need to restrict by subject matter or region. When you have no print cycle, information can be updated continually, and by everyone. True to the field guide form factor, all this can fit in your back pocket. The coolest part is that it can learn from the people who use it. Taking full advantage of the current explosion in machine learning, Fieldguide is most fundamentally an AI tool for biodiversity. Fieldguide is not quite there yet in terms of training on sufficient data to recognize all flora and fauna (moving full speed ahead on that front)...so to get a REAL sense of the desired product experience, I suggest you take a look at the first Fieldguide app that we launched called LepSnap - image recognition for moths and butterflies, available for iPhone or LepSnap.org. That app is ~80% accurate at identifying North America Lepidoptera to the scientific rank that is feasible with a photo, and we're working on training Fg to recognize all 175,000+ species of moth/butterfly around the world. We'll be launching similar apps for birds, bugs, plants, fungi, etc and the main Fieldguide app will include them all, serving as the central hub. We've got lots of work to do! Thanks for commenting Jacqueline and I'm all ears for how to make Fg more interesting/useful :)

Fieldguide

A field guide for everything

A field guide for everything