Take or upload a photo of a species you've seen, and HydroVision AI suggests what it is. It works on mammals, birds, fish, invertebrates, plants, and fungi. It's an aid, not a verdict — always verify the result against the species card before submitting.
From the Biodiversity Monitor:
- Tap the purple HydroVision AI™ card on the form
- Choose Take Photo (uses your device camera) or Upload (from your gallery)
- The photo uploads and the AI analyses it. This takes 5–15 seconds.
- A suggestion appears with the species name and confidence level
- Tap the suggestion to accept it — the species is pre-filled into the form
You can also use HydroVision AI as a standalone identifier without submitting a sighting. It's useful when you just want to know what you're looking at.
Good on clear photos of common species. Less reliable on:
- Poor-quality photos — blurry, dark, distant, obscured
- Juveniles that look very different to adults
- Species with many visually similar relatives (some warblers, some grasses, some fungi)
- Images with multiple species in frame — the AI will pick one
- Species not in its training data — rare, very regional, or recently-arrived invasives
The AI gives you a suggestion with a confidence level. Treat high confidence as "probably right, verify anyway." Treat low confidence as "interesting guess, look closely before trusting."
The app shows you a reference image and conservation status for the suggested species. Look at them. If what you photographed doesn't match what the reference shows, the AI is wrong and you should either:
- Search manually by name
- Try a different photo (better angle, better light)
- Record at a broader level (e.g. "Warbler sp." instead of guessing a specific warbler)
It's genuinely fine to say "I'm not sure." A record at family level is more useful than a confidently-wrong record at species level.
Because the dataset only works if it's trustworthy. Every submission is independently analysed by our AI models in the background, producing a verified "AI Count" alongside your manual record. If the two disagree dramatically, that's flagged. The whole point is to have a record that regulators can trust — which means we can't let the AI be the final say.
Your observation, verified by photographic evidence, cross-checked by AI, located precisely by what3words — that's the chain of custody that makes angler and naturalist data count.
- Photos you submit are stored securely and only used for verification and the public data record
- EXIF location data (the GPS coordinates your camera quietly embeds) is stripped on upload — we use the location you provided, not what your camera recorded
- The AI processing runs on our infrastructure, not on a third-party API that trains on your photos