Version 0.12

Before · After

Added

• See the wildlife near you. Every creature in the wildlife browser — the monarch, the luna moth, the gopher tortoise — now has a "See it near you" section. Share your location or just type a ZIP code, and Indigene pulls real, community-verified photos of that animal spotted near there, or you can look it up in a region where it's found without being there. The photos come live from iNaturalist, called by your own browser, and each one is credited to the person who took it — the same way the plant pages already show a plant growing near you. (Some entries are broad groups, like "Jays, turkeys & woodpeckers," that don't point at a single species; those don't offer the lookup.)
• Don't want to share your exact location? Type a ZIP code instead. Both "See it near you" (on wildlife pages) and "See it growing near you" (on plant pages) now offer sharing your location and entering a ZIP code (or town) as two equal choices — so you can see what's growing and flying near a place without handing over precise location, and it works the same on a desktop with no GPS.
• A Privacy & safety page, in plain words for everyone — including kids and the grown-ups looking out for them. It lays out the whole story: no account, no tracking, no ads; your saved spots stay on your device; your location is used only when you tap, and you can always type a ZIP code instead of sharing it; and exactly which public science services your browser talks to, and what each is told. Reach it from the footer on any page, and from a short "🔒 …" note right where the app asks for your location or saves a spot. See it at Privacy & safety.
• Every region's page now opens with the same kind of at-a-glance number tiles a plant's page has: how many native plants are on the list, how many kinds of caterpillars its best plant can feed (up to 511 species on white oak alone in the Mid-Atlantic), how many kinds of wildlife we can tie to the list by name, and how many keystone plants it holds. Tap any tile for a plain-words explanation of what the number means and where it comes from.
• A filter box on region pages: start typing a name — common or scientific — and the plant list narrows as you type, no more hunting through 40 rows or bouncing out to the search page.
• The category buttons on region pages (Trees, Shrubs, Ferns…) now each carry their little plant silhouette, matching the drawings on the plant rows below.

Changed

• One tap now takes you through every sighting's photos, not just one person's. When a plant or animal page finds several sightings near you, the photo viewer used to stop at the edge of the sighting you tapped — to see the next person's pictures you had to close it and start again. Now the arrows (and the ← → keys) carry straight on into the next sighting, all the way through everything on the page. It always tells you where you are — "9 / 11 · sighting 3 of 4" — and as you cross from one sighting to the next, the credit underneath changes with it: the new photographer's name, their licence, where and when they saw it, and a link to that sighting on iNaturalist.
• Bigger, tidier photo thumbnails. A sighting's little square photos now sit three to a row and fill the width of the card, instead of being a fixed small size that left a lonely fourth picture stranded on a second row. When a sighting has more pictures than fit, the last one wears a small "+2" badge — tap it and the viewer will page through all of them.
• Opening a sighting photo is smoother now. The photo viewer that pops up when you tap an iNaturalist picture (on a plant's or an animal's page) used to open small, then jump taller and draw the photo in stuttery strips as it arrived. Now the viewer opens at its full size right away, shows a small spinning circle while the photo travels, and the finished picture fades in gently. The link back to the original sighting on iNaturalist is now a quiet underlined link under the photographer's credit instead of a big button.
• Region pages now lead with just the region's name — "Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont" instead of "Every native we know for Mid-Atlantic / Northeast Piedmont" — and say the rest in one short line underneath.
• The showcase cards on Meet the natives are more compact: the keystone mark now sits beside the plant's name as a small arch, and "Full profile →" tucks in at the end of the description instead of taking a line of its own.
• The fine print about what "native" means on a region's page is shorter and plainer: native here means native to this region specifically — outside it, treat the picks as untested.
• The Where are you standing? step now shows one way of setting your spot at a time. Using your device's location leads, and a small link — "Don't want to use your location? Use a ZIP code or pick a region instead." — swaps in the town search or the region list when you ask for it, with a matching link to switch back. Less to scroll past, and the Next button is always close by.
• Picking your region by hand is now two taps: choose a region and the list folds down to just your choice (a "Show all regions" link brings the rest back), then press Next when you're sure — instead of being whisked to the next step the moment you tap.