From field notes to instant IDs: Technology aids India’s butterfly watchers

New Delhi: Two new apps are making butterfly identification faster for naturalists, students, and beginners across India.

Butterfly Vision, a web app by Theivaprakasham Hari of The Nature and Butterfly Society, identifies over 300 Western Ghats species. Users upload a photo and instantly get the common and scientific name. Hari calls it “a mini-encyclopedia on butterflies,” cutting the time researchers once spent matching wing patterns in books.

The second set — ‘itrees’, ‘ibutterflies’ and ‘ibirds’ — was developed by Dr. V. Shubhalaxmi of Ladybird Consulting. Backed by a $25,000 grant, the free Android apps cover 50 common urban species in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad. They launched December 12 as part of a WWF-India and L V Prasad Eye Institute project.

WWF-India is using the apps with schools through an ‘Urban iNaturewatch Challenge’, aiming to train 3,000 student citizen scientists across 40 schools. The data will help track how climate change shifts the timing of birds, butterflies and trees in cities.

“Teachers used to avoid biodiversity topics because they couldn’t identify species without books or experts. We have decentralised that information,” Dr. Shubhalaxmi said.

Both projects merge tech with citizen science, turning every phone upload into data for conservation.