How to identfy species on photos?

JungleDragon allows you to identify the specie (animal, plants or fungus) on a photo. When identified, background information about the specie is shown next to the photo. This enables people to learn about the species' taxonomy, distrubution, diet, habitat and other interesting information.

Who can identify species?

When signed in, you can identify species on photos that you uploaded. If you have earned the social image editing capability, you can also identify species on photos uploaded by others. Other users with this capability can also identify species on your photos. Identifying species is therefore a community activity, where we help each other.

How to identify species?

On photos that you are allowed to identify the specie on, you will find the "Identify specie" button in the right sidebar of the photo page. Use this button on photos that contain species only, if the photo is a landscape, identification is not relevant. In the "Add specie" dialog, simply search for a specie name.

Identification is a somewhat delicate process, therefore please consider the detailed instructions below:

  • JungleDragon uses the english version of Wikipedia as a source of specie information. Therefore, the identification must occur in English.
  • You can search for species by either the common name or the scientific name
  • If there is no specie page at Wikipedia for your search string, identification will fail.
  • Identification must happen at the specie or sub specie level. This means it needs to be exact enough. A "Bear" is not considered a specie, but a "Brown bear" is.
  • In case you are having trouble matching a specie, check Wikipedia. Only specie pages will match with JungleDragon. A specie page at Wikipedia can be recognized by two elements. 1) the taxonomy box is present on the right side of the page. 2) the taxonomy box contains the property "binomial" or "trinomial". Only when these two conditions are met, JungleDragon is able to identify the specie.
  • If you are still having trouble matching a specie page from Wikipedia, be sure to check the spelling of the specie. Furthermore, some specie pages in Wikipedia are case sensitive.
  • If a specie has been used before, you can simply pick it from the suggestion list in the dialog.
  • If a specie has not been used before and you enter a valid specie name, JungleDragon will fetch the specie information from Wikipedia, which may take a few seconds. This only happens once per specie.
  • Sometimes an appearently valid specie name will fail due to the scientific and Wikipedia community disagreeing on a name. For example, "African Elephant" seems like a valid specie name, yet at Wikipedia the consensus is that "African Bush Elephant" is the proper term. As few people will know this, this may lead to frequent specie identification failures. In such cases, JungleDragon is able to manually create an alias, meaning that "African Elephant" will automatically be mapped to "African Bush Elephant". These aliases are maintained manually, please contact us if you think one should be created.

Specie information

When JungleDragon is able to match a specie search string with a Wikipedia page, it will try to download and parse selective pieces of specie information from Wikipedia. This is a complex process due to the large variety of formats in which Wikipedia authors may write and structure this information. If you think there is an error on the JungleDragon specie information pages, please report them.

Note that JungleDragon has limitations for revisualizing complex Wikipedia markup, such as tables.