第2918期: Create a natural world database through the use of apps

This is a slime mold. Cat Chang is an urban designer. But in her spare time, she likes to examine other life-forms.

这是一种黏菌。张凯特是城市设计师。但在业余时间，她喜欢研究其他生命形式。

Ever since I was a little girl, I've been interested in the natural world. We're native Hawaiian.

从小我就对自然界充满兴趣，我们是夏威夷原住民。

Our family and my grandmother would take me around her yard. She would show us all the plants and how you use them.

家人和祖母会带我参观她的院子。她会向我们展示所有的植物以及它们的用途。

And later when I was interested in learning about fungi, I didn't have anybody to help me with it. Someone suggested iNaturalist to me, and it's on your cell phone.

后来我对真菌产生了兴趣，却没有人能在这方面帮助我。有人向我推荐了iNaturist，可以装在手机上。

iNaturalist is a joint initiative of National Geographic and the California Academy of Sciences.

iNaturalist是美国国家地理学会与加利福尼亚科学院联合发起的项目。

Essentially people can take a photo of anything living, plants, animal, fungus, slime mold, put it on the website and other people identify it.

本质上，人们可以给任何有生命的东西拍照，比如植物、动物、真菌、黏菌，然后把照片上传到网站上，然后由其他人来识别。

The app compares the image with those already in the database to begin the identification process. But ultimately, human experts weigh in.

该应用将图像与数据库中已有的图像进行比较以启动识别过程，但最终仍需由人类专家进行判断。

The best part of it is there's a community of people that can also participate.

最棒的是，还有一个可以参与其中的群体。

It's used by scientists to collect data, and actually write papers, as well as just amateur people who are really interested in getting more involved, and caring more about nature.

科学家用它来收集数据并撰写论文，同样也有纯粹出于兴趣想更深入参与、更关心自然的业余爱好者使用它。

This time of year, I'm particularly looking for salamanders. And I always like to see mammals, they're one of my favorites, and birds of course. I have almost 55,000 observations. It's a lot.

每年的这个时候，我特别想找到蝾螈。我一直很喜欢观察哺乳动物，它们是我最喜欢的动物之一，当然还有鸟类。我已经有近55000次观察记录了，这可不少。

iNaturalist has observations from every country in the world. Right now, I believe we have over 26 million observations and about 700,000 active users.

iNaturalist拥有来自世界各国的观察记录。目前，我认为我们有超过2600万条观测数据和约70万活跃用户。

This collaboration across continents led recently to a surprising discovery in California:

这种跨大洲的合作最近在加利福尼亚州有了一项惊人的发现：

the type of giant sunfish whose normal habitat is thousands of miles to the south, an indication perhaps of a rapidly changing world.

一种通常栖息地在数千英里以南的巨型翻车鱼出现在这里，这或许预示着世界正在迅速变化。