DMW
Well-known member
Like most birders, I think, I still prefer to have physical paper field guides, but once the major gaps in geographical coverage are filled (and which Lynx seem to be tackling) it's perhaps likely that improvements in regional guides will be incremental.
So how would you like to see field guides develop in the future?
The only significant paper-based advances I can think of are specialist texts dealing with difficult groups, to be used as a supplement to general field guides. What I am thinking of is Faansie Peacock's guide to the LBJs of Southern Africa, which is an absolutely superb book. It would be tremendously useful to have something similar for e.g. Asian warblers.
Major innovation is likely to be in the digital realm. I can think of a few possible innovations:
GPS-based filtering - let's say I'm in Atlantic Forest in SE Brazil and have a digital field guide to Brazil. I really don't need hundreds of extraneous Amazonian, caatinga, or cerrado species cluttering up the plates when trying to pin-down a bird. Wouldn't it be useful if I could have a setting to enable GPS filtering and remove these, leaving me with just the set of birds in range. This could potentially be fine-tuned down to site-specific lists.
Sound guides - obviously quite a few regional apps have recordings, but curated sets of high-quality recordings are surely a major priority for many parts of the world. It's massively time-consuming downloading from Xeno-canto, and unless you are familiar with a particular species, it's not always possible to know which recordings are the most useful or representative. Some of the commercially available sets are not the best, and require considerable supplementation to be fully useful. Is there a separate market for high quality curated sets?
Annotatable field guides - it would be quite nice to be able to scribble notes or sketches with a digital pen on a tablet-based field guide
User-selectable or custom-sequences - yep, we can all go back to Voous order, or put all the small brown birds next to each other.
User supplementation - the ability to drag and drop external illustrations onto plates (e.g. photos off the web), or add / edit text.
Real-time taxonomic updates
Audio-recognition function - save you the bother of identifying what is calling!
Anything I've missed?! B
So how would you like to see field guides develop in the future?
The only significant paper-based advances I can think of are specialist texts dealing with difficult groups, to be used as a supplement to general field guides. What I am thinking of is Faansie Peacock's guide to the LBJs of Southern Africa, which is an absolutely superb book. It would be tremendously useful to have something similar for e.g. Asian warblers.
Major innovation is likely to be in the digital realm. I can think of a few possible innovations:
GPS-based filtering - let's say I'm in Atlantic Forest in SE Brazil and have a digital field guide to Brazil. I really don't need hundreds of extraneous Amazonian, caatinga, or cerrado species cluttering up the plates when trying to pin-down a bird. Wouldn't it be useful if I could have a setting to enable GPS filtering and remove these, leaving me with just the set of birds in range. This could potentially be fine-tuned down to site-specific lists.
Sound guides - obviously quite a few regional apps have recordings, but curated sets of high-quality recordings are surely a major priority for many parts of the world. It's massively time-consuming downloading from Xeno-canto, and unless you are familiar with a particular species, it's not always possible to know which recordings are the most useful or representative. Some of the commercially available sets are not the best, and require considerable supplementation to be fully useful. Is there a separate market for high quality curated sets?
Annotatable field guides - it would be quite nice to be able to scribble notes or sketches with a digital pen on a tablet-based field guide
User-selectable or custom-sequences - yep, we can all go back to Voous order, or put all the small brown birds next to each other.
User supplementation - the ability to drag and drop external illustrations onto plates (e.g. photos off the web), or add / edit text.
Real-time taxonomic updates
Audio-recognition function - save you the bother of identifying what is calling!
Anything I've missed?! B