I Can See Nature!

Connect to the world around you, identify nature on-the-go!

I Can See Nature is an interactive educational …

Identification tool for 🌱︎🚶︎ gardeners ^[1] , landscapers, naturalists, teachers, students, ⚜︎ scouts, citizen scientists and anyone who wants to learn more about the world around them.

Why use I Can See Nature?
How does I Can See Nature work?
What we cover

🌳︎☙ Plant geeks 📱︎💻︎ Computer geeks

**Why use I Can See Nature?**

This web app concentrates on identification, which we do in a unique way:

We provide multiple identification paths, to help you identify your specimen, regardless of conditions — short or tall, growing season or dormant, flowering or not.
We provide backlinks, additional paths, and easily-confused charts, for when you get off-track.
We provide id paths based on attributes you can observe in the 🏞 field. Without tools, whenever possible.
We field-test our product, leading to continual improvements. And invite our 👥︎ community to help.

After you complete the identification path, we:

help you verify your identification,
then link you to quality sources to learn more about your specimen.

Throughout the process:

For students and ⚜︎ scouts, we provide:
◦ blue help buttons whenever we use biological terminology with which you might not yet be familiar.
For 🌱︎🚶︎ gardeners ^[1] and naturalists, we provide:
◦ solid ID steps using standard, consistent, biological terminology, and
◦ "Learn more" links to quality sources.
For landscapers and foresters, we provide:
◦ 🔍︎ Search and
◦ 📧︎ email-your-findings tools.
For all users, we provide:
◦ an easy method to report errors or request improvements.
Which we can implement quickly, with our fast turnaround cycle.
During field-testing, we use this same method to report findings to ourselves — we eat our own dogfood!
To help users 🌐︎ around the globe, we provide:
◦ dates primarily in format ISO 8601 ("yyyy-mm-dd"), and
◦ measurements primarily in metric units, followed by Imperial or US customary "freedom" units (usually in parentheses).
To aid readability, we try to use:
◦ parallel construction,
◦ standard spelling and punctuation,
◦ the Oxford/Associated Press Stylebook spacing around m-dashes "—", and
◦ wherever it aids readability or avoids ambiguity, the Oxford comma.

For all these reasons, we hope you will find this tool easier to use than that 📚︎ stack of fieldguides in your 🎒︎ fieldpack. Lighter, too, and always with you, thanks to being responsive/mobile-first/mobile-friendly!

And we hope you appreciate this tool's 🏛 educational component. Not just because we value 🏛 education, but because after you have identified something using this tool a few times, we hope you will find ICSN faster to use, and needed only for novel specimens!

References: Gardening

^[1] Gardening is the most popular hobby in America.
— "What Are the Most Popular Hobbies in America?" InterActiveCorp. accessed 2016-04-27.

90 million Americans garden.
— ▶︎ Video Growing a Greener World Episode 1207 "Small Space Gardening", accessed 2021-11-30. That would be 27% of the population — more than 1 in 4 Americans are gardeners!

Before COVID, 42% of American households gardened. During COVID (2022), this grew to 75% of American households.
— Author Jennifer Jewell, speaking 2024-03-26.

Americans spend $40 billion/year on gardening!
— ▶︎ Video Growing a Greener World Episode 1006 "Catching up with TV Garden Legend Paul James", accessed 2020-03-11.

"Gardening is beneficial for health: A meta-analysis." Preventive Medicine Reports. 2017-03-05. Pages 92–99. DOI: 10.1016/j.pmedr.2016.11.007 , which I found referenced by the popular press article "If you want to live to 100, aging experts say you should take up this hobby ASAP." Parade Magazine. Updated November 6, 2023. Accessed 2023-11-09.

Gardeners are optimists; they are planning for the future.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer 2023-11-07.

"Gardening is assisted migration"
— ^{[citation needed]}

Tidbits for or about gardeners, or about gardening, appear throughout ICSN.

**How does I Can See Nature work?**

To help you identify the specimen in front of you, ICSN starts you at its main selection page — the 🏠︎ home page.

Based on what you observe about your specimen, you will press one or more

These buttons come in several types:

blue help buttons explain a concept or term, in a few sentences.
In this tool, we use standard, consistent, biological terminology, but the minimum necessary. For any concepts more complicated than leaf! For details on our standards, please see our plant terminology page. Striving to make us all more expert!
navigate to pages or documents in this website.
Press the green button that best describes your specimen.
You will then see:
◦ another selection page (or further down in the current selection page), or
◦ a detail page.
If you are still on a selection page, please select another green button.
If you see a detail page, you will see:
◦ the name of your specimen (both common and scientific);
◦ a possible "easily-confused" chart;
◦ "Also called", "Part of", "Native to" uses by 👥︎ people and the 🐝︎ ecosystem, any information we find particularly-interesting about this topic; and
◦ "Learn more" links to quality sources with specialized information about your specimen, using …
navigate to pages or documents in other websites.
also navigate to pages or documents in other websites, but are special in some way, such as describing invasive species or our 👥︎ strategic partners.
navigate to pages or documents in a sister website.
send you an 📧︎ email that you have identified your specimen.
🚧 In the future, these buttons will present a page where you may specify any number of:
◦ send you an 📧︎ email that you have identified your specimen,
◦ add this to a list for you to track and 🗺 map your identifications,
◦ add this to a list for your Facebook friends to track and 🗺 map your identifications, and/or
◦ add this to a list for the 👥︎ entire ICSN community to (anonymously) track and 🗺 map your identifications.
Grayed-out buttons (if present) are placeholders for links that will appear in the near future.

In addition:

Buttons with navigate to pages or documents that are responsive/mobile-first/mobile-friendly.
Pages that are also part of this or sister websites (the green or intermediate buttons with white text) are built using a homegrown static website generator, into a format that responds/auto-adapts to different:
◦ platforms (📱︎ smartphones/mobiles/cellphones vs ▯ tablets vs 💻︎ computers vs 📺︎ large-screen TVs),
◦ orientations (▭ landscape vs ▯ portrait), and
◦ window resizing (pinch-zoom-out, spread-zoom-in, or drag border).
Buttons with navigate to pages or documents that are not yet 📱︎ mobile-friendly.
While probably awesome on 💻︎ large screens, these pages or documents may be difficult to use on ▯ small screens.

To see the destination of a link (without going to it yet), do a long-press or mouse-hover.

To return to the page you came from, you can use your web browser's or or or or function.

Or you can use the buttons in the ↖↙ top-left and bottom-left corners on each page in this site.

Or on an 🍎︎ Apple iPhone, you can swipe the screen from left-to-right.

Or you can use the button(s) at the bottom of each page. We include buttons not just to:
A) the page from where you came (a normal backlink), but also to
B) each page that links to your page.

This allows you to:
A) return to the page from where you came (via that normal backlink), or
B) traverse up and down along the lower levels of the ID path page hierarchies.

Of this, this page is a bad example, with only …

Navigate to pages that link here 🏠︎ home page

Mathmatical symbols used in ICSN:

Symbol:		meaning:

∼ a		approximately a.
>a		greater than a.
≳a		approximately or greater than a.
a+		a or more.
<a		less than a.
a–b		the range of values between a and b.

What we cover

ICSN started with 🌳︎🌲︎🌴︎ trees and shrubs with leaves, later tightening the language as terrestrial woody plants with 🌳︎ 🍁︎🍂︎🌿︎ broadleaves . Then, we added evergreens, later tightening the language as 🌲︎ conifers order Pinales. Then added identification of those that had 🍃︎ dropped their broadleaves or needles (i.e., have bare branches). We started with plants that grow wild in 🇨🇦 🇺🇸 North America, east of the 🗻︎ Rocky Mountains. Then added some plants from 🇨🇦 🇺🇸 North America's Pacific Coast and 🏜 desert southwest. But our ambition is 🌎︎🌏︎🌍︎ global, and we are backfilling as fast as we can. After we get good coverage, we will continue with terrestrial 🌾︎⚶⚘ ☙ herbaceous plants, ♒︎ aquatic plants, moss, 🍄︎ mushrooms and fungi, animals (🐟︎ 🐢︎🐇︎ vertebrate 🐾︎ tracks and 💩︎ scat, and 🐝︎ invertebrates), and ⛰💎︎ rocks and minerals. If you would like to suggest an area to work on next (or any fixes!), please use the button at the bottom of each page.

🌳︎☙ Plant geeks, keep reading …

If you are an uber-plant-geek, such as a paleobotanist:

after reviewing our plant terminology,
you probably want to use morphotyping (binning) ( nice chart ) as a more industrial method of identifying plants.

📱︎💻︎ Computer geeks, keep reading …

This tool runs in a web browser, 📶︎ connected to the Internet.

Our Product Advisory Board tested this tool on web browsers from many vendors, and on many screen sizes.
This format responds/auto-adapts to different:

platforms (📱︎ smartphones/mobiles/cellphones vs ▯ tablets vs 💻︎ computers vs 📺︎ large-screen TVs),
orientations (▭ landscape vs ▯ portrait), and
window resizing (pinch-zoom-out, spread-zoom-in, or drag border).

The technology used for the buttons require that your web browser has JavaScript turned on, but if your browser has JavaScript turned off, this site's entry screen tells you about it, and provides a link as to how to turn it on.

To build this tool, we used agile software development techniques: very-short delivery cycles; an iterative, incremental, evolutionary process; and ever-improving quality. We made it easy to report errors and request improvements, with a button on each page. When you report a bug, we hope you will soon get a confirmation of your bug report, a confirmation that we fixed the bug, and how you can get the fix. All quick. You also should see new content added quite often. If you want to keep up with this new content, please an occasional (monthly?) 📧︎ email newsletter announcing new releases and what they contain. We will not share your email address with anyone outside the team. Please let us know what you need!

Creativity is part of human nature.
It can only be untaught.

— Ai Weiwei 艾未未 (艾神).

Identifying what you see usually involves an 🆔︎🔑︎ identification key.

Most 📚︎ fieldbooks use 🆔︎🔑︎ identification keys that are:

single-access (set up only one way — if the 🔑︎ key wants to know about ⫴ hairs on the leaves, and it is ❄ winter or the leaves are 20 m [70 ft] up, you are out of luck),
unidirectional (each node/entry/webpage references/links/points to only its child nodes, not its parent[s]),
dichotomous (each decision node references/links/points to exactly two child nodes), and
static (non-interactive).

This tool uses 🆔︎🔑︎ identification keys that are:

multi-access (e.g., you can identify a maple by its 🍁︎ leaves in its growing season, by its ⬮ leaf scars in its dormant season, and by its bark if it is tall),
bidirectional (each node/entry/webpage references/links/points both directions — to its child and parent nodes),
polytomous (we can fit more than two buttons on a screen), and
interactive.

From our various sources, we strive to select criteria that are easy to use:

We won't ask you to use a 🔬︎ microscope.
We will minimize use of a 🔎︎ hand-lens (although I now carry one, to see ⫴ hairs or vascular bundle scars ).
You probably have no need of a 📏︎ ruler or tape measure if you know your thumb width, ✋︎ palm width, 🥾 boot-top height, 👟︎ shoe length and 🚶︎ stride.
We will minimize asking you what is 20 m (70 ft) in the air (although binoculars might help if you can't determine which leaves on the ground belonged to your tree).
We won't ask you what the plant did months ago, such as whether the plant started with one or two leaves (monocot vs 🌱︎ dicot), or whether the flower emerged before the leaves.

Because of the agile-build and nine ID advantages described above, and because it is light and always with you (being on your 📱︎ phone), we hope you will find this tool to be more useful than that 📚︎ stack of fieldbooks in your 🎒︎ fieldpack. Not replace it per se. But perhaps useful enough for you to move those 📚︎ fieldbooks from your 🎒︎ fieldpack to your 🚗︎ vehicle. Or from your 🚗︎ vehicle to your 🏢︎ office. :-)

However, it will take time for this tool to contain everything in your 📚︎ stack of fieldbooks. We welcome requests for your favorite additions, subtractions and fixes — please see the button at the bottom of each page.

I Can See Nature! is proudly envisioned, built, maintained and fostered in West Michigan, in and around Kent County and Grand Rapids!

We recognize that our area — Grand Rapids, in West Michigan — is situated on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabe people — the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, of the Three Fires Confederacy. We recognize their enduring presence. We are grateful for their care of the land, and the many lessons they have shared with our community.

Chi Miigwetch!

Thank you! — Eric Piehl (he/him/his), Founder, CTO, 📱︎💻︎ computer geek/Master Naturalist/citizen scientist/agent of change/environmental entrepreneur. LinkedIn. Eric Piehl comments on … some of my other projects.

Navigate to pages that link here

🏠︎ 🏠︎ home page