Learning Tool: Tainá

Tainá is your Telegram field companion. Send her a photo or a note about a plant, animal, or fungus — she identifies the species and records the observation under your GainForest account.

Open Tainá

Tainá supports interactive field learning, species identification, and community nature documentation.

Observations confirmed through Tainá are saved under your GainForest account. Photos and notes are stored with your account files.

Tainá is especially useful for communities, students, youth groups, local organizations, and nature stewards who are learning how environmental evidence can support a Project. It is more interactive than a standard upload form, making it a helpful learning companion and species identification buddy in the field.

Tainá is inspired by the transfer of oral knowledge from Indigenous and local communities, where ecological knowledge is often shared through conversation, stories, names, sounds, and place-based memory.

What Tainá is good for

Tainá can support:

• guided biodiversity walks

• school or youth learning sessions

• BioBlitz participation

• community field training

• first-time biodiversity documentation

• AI-assisted species identification practice

• learning what information makes an observation useful

• voice notes from the field

• changing language for more accessible learning

Tainá is not only an upload tool. It is also a learning companion that helps users understand what to notice in the field.

How it works

Tainá runs through Telegram. Users connect a private Telegram bot to their GainForest account, then send the bot photos or notes from the field.

1. Connect your own bot

Create a private Telegram bot with @BotFather and link it on GainForest.app. Only you can talk to it.

2. Send photos, notes, or voice

Message your bot whatever you see in the field. You can send photos, written notes, or voice messages. Tainá identifies the species and asks for the details that matter.

3. Observations, recorded

Each confirmed sighting becomes a biodiversity observation saved under your account and visible on your profile.

Users can also change language, making Tainá easier to use for multilingual community activities, youth learning, and field training.

Tainá can support species identification using AI, but it should not replace local knowledge, community expertise, or expert ecological review. Users should always check species suggestions where possible.

Current access

Because Tainá runs through Telegram bots, GainForest can currently support around 20 Tainá users.

This makes it best suited for small-group learning, field training, BioBlitz activities, youth education, and community field days.

How Tainá connects to Projects

Tainá observations can become useful Project evidence when they are reviewed, saved, and linked to the right Project.

For example, a community could use Tainá during a BioBlitz walk, record observations, then link those observations to a Project to show biodiversity presence, stewardship activity, or community monitoring work.

Tainá for Observations

Related pages

Weekly BioBlitz ChallengeBiodiversity ObservationsLinking Evidence to Projects