Welcome to finwave
What you’ll learn
Section titled “What you’ll learn”- What finwave is and what problem it solves
- Who it’s for
- The key concepts you’ll see again and again
- Where to go next
What is finwave?
Section titled “What is finwave?”finwave is a platform for wildlife photo-identification — the practice of recognising individual animals from photos of their natural markings (dorsal fin nicks, fluke patterns, body scars, eye-patches, and so on).
It is built around three things:
- Catalogues of individuals — every recognised animal in a population gets a profile with images, sighting history, and relationships to other individuals.
- Encounters — every time an observer photographs a group of animals in the field, the resulting set of photos is recorded as an encounter. Encounters are the raw observational record everything else flows from.
- Identifications — the link between an individual in the catalogue and a photo in an encounter. finwave uses ML models to propose identifications, but every identification is tracked with an evidence tier so you always know how strong the evidence is.
Who is finwave for?
Section titled “Who is finwave for?”- Researchers running population studies (mark-recapture, social network, predator-prey, distribution).
- Conservation organisations maintaining long-running catalogues for a population.
- Citizen-science contributors submitting opportunistic encounters to a population they’ve been invited to.
- Field photographers who want their photos turned into useful long-term observational records.
If you’re not sure which of these applies to you, start anyway — finwave’s permission model adapts to your role inside each population.
Key concepts at a glance
Section titled “Key concepts at a glance”| Concept | One-line summary |
|---|---|
| Population | A bounded study group (e.g. “Southern Resident Killer Whales”). Almost everything in finwave is scoped to a population. |
| Encounter | One field observation: photographer + location + date + photos. |
| Individual | A recognised animal with a profile, sighting history, and (optionally) social relationships. |
| Annotation | A bounding box on a photo identifying which animal is shown. |
| Evidence tier | How strong the evidence behind an identification is — Attested, ModelSuggested, ModelCorroborated, or Confirmed. |
| Organisation | The team or institute under which an encounter was submitted. Controls visibility of private data. |
| Role | Your permission level inside a population — Novice, Expert, Professional, or Administrator. |
You don’t need to memorise these now. They are linked from every page that uses them.
What’s next?
Section titled “What’s next?”- Quick Start — create an account, join a population, and submit your first encounter.
- Navigating the App — what each section of the sidebar does.
- Core Concepts — read in order if you’d like a guided tour.
If you have a backlog of thousands of historical photos sitting in a folder or cloud bucket, also see the Desktop Client — it is the right tool for bulk onboarding.