Fauna: Identify Wildlife

Response from developer

Thank you for sharing your feedback, and we’re sorry you had a frustrating experience, especially on a trip you bought the subscription for. We’re committed to accurate identification and try to be transparent about how confident we are. Rare species are the hardest to get right since there are far fewer photos and records of them to learn from, and they often look very similar to common relatives. The same animal can also go by different names. That’s why each result shows a confidence score, possible lookalikes, and other common names, and why we include a guide on which shots to take. Another factor is that Fauna currently identifies at the species level, because subspecies can be difficult to tell apart from a photo alone. That means a rare local subspecies appears under the name and status of its species as a whole, not under its own local name. We’re exploring how to show subspecies and flag rare local populations, and we’re being careful to do it only where it can be done reliably. We’re constantly updating the app and looking for ways to improve it. Right now, reporting an identification as incorrect sends it to us for analysis but doesn’t change your sighting on its own. While you can switch the identification to one of the suggested matches, we don’t yet have a way for an expert to manually review reports and provide a verified correction. One option we’re considering is to let you change a sighting to your own correction. We’re still working out how to do both well and would love your input. If you’re willing, we’d like to look into this further. Please email us at support@faunatheapp.com and tell us which sightings you reported, along with any context you think is important. That would help us understand what went wrong and how to improve.