Orthoptera Hunter CZ

App for identification and monitoring of orthopterans of Czechia.

The application Orthoptera Hunter CZ was created with the support of Student Grant Competition of University of Ostrava. It is a product of collective work of the Department of Biology and Ecology, the Institute for Research and Applications of Fuzzy Modeling and the Department of Informatics and Computers.

The application for the recognition of orthopterans was based on ongoing efforts of the entire team to create additional mobile applications that would enable users to recognize other groups of Czech animals in a simplified version.

This project was developed in the last year mainly thanks to the above mentioned cooperation with other experts not only in biology, but also in mathematics and computer science, such as Michal Burda, Oto Kaláb, Stanislav Ožana, Marek Malina and Martin Prášek.

Together, we managed to create an application for basic identification and mapping of orthopterans, which main purpose is not only to popularize this order of insects and nature as a whole among the general public, but also to involve the public in collecting data on species occurrence, which is called the citizen science.

We believe that this application will lead to an increased interest in an important, but often neglected group of insects, the orthopterans. We assume that the collected data obtained in this application will lead to a higher awareness of the occurrence of individual species, new scientific knowledge and, last but not least, to the protection of endangered species and their habitats.

The information used in the application was taken from:

Kočárek P., Holuša J., Vlk R., Marhoul P. (2013) Rovnokřídlí České republiky, Academia

https://www1.osu.cz/orthoptera/

For the identification algorithm, in addition to expert knowledge, the data of the atlas of the orthopterans Kočárek et al. 2013 and finding data of orthopterans (export of data as of 20 October 2019) from the Nature Conservation Database managed by the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic (available at:https://portal.nature.cz/nd)

Most of the photos come from the archive of Petr Kočárek, partial photos from the server https://www.inaturalist.org/ from users agujaceratops, Gilles San Martin, jupreudhomme, lozifer, Pascal Dubois and snotolf.