Herpeto Hunter CZ

App for identification and monitoring of amphibians and reptiles of Czechia.

The Herpeto-Hunter CZ application was created with the support by 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 with the participation of Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech republic.

The idea to create an application for the recognition of amphibians and reptiles 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 Stanislav Ožana, Lukáš Choleva, Michaela Drgová, Marek Malina, Martin Prašek, Michal Burda and Veronika Zavadilová.

Together, we managed to create an application for basic identification and mapping of amphibians and reptiles, which main purpose is not only to identify and popularize these groups of vertebrates 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 the collected data obtained in this application will lead to a higher awareness of the occurrence of individual species and the protection of endangered species and their habitats.

The information used in the application was taken from:

Zwach, Ivan. Naši obojživelníci a plazi ve fotografii. Státní zemědělské nakladatelství, 1990. 144 pp. ISBN 80-209-0053-5.

Moravec, Jiří. Obojživelníci a plazi České republiky. Academia, 2019. 464 pp. ISBN 978-80-200-2984-3.

Moravec, Jiří (ed.) a kolektiv. Fauna ČR - Plazi. Academia Praha, 2015. 531 pp. ISBN 978-80-200-2416-9.

Amphibian finding data (data export from January 1, 1995 to December 5, 2018) from the Nature Conservation Database managed by the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic (available at: https://portal.nature.cz/nd)

We would like to thank Jaromír Maštera for providing most of the amphibian photographs. Partial photographs of amphibians were also provided by Filip Šálek, Jitka Kačalová, Lukáš Kopec, Marie Slabejová, Vít Zavadil, Ján Kautman, Lukáš Choleva and Stanislav Ožana. Thanks to author Tomáš Krajča, Lukáš Kopec, Jitka Kačalová, Marie Slabejová, Vít Zavadil, Samuel Valka, Jan Michalik and Jiřina Drlíková for partial reptile photographs.