A field journal that seals what you saw
Vickrey pairs a field observer's notes with an open-weight model that suggests — and an observer who decides. The decision is sealed on the device with a signature and a hash chain, so any later edit cracks the seal instead of silently rewriting the past.
European robin, on the hawthorn by the gate —
later edit: Magpie?
EDIT DETECTED
92 seconds, hosted on YouTube (unlisted) — watch directly. Shows a real server-hosted Gemma 3 4B identification sealed and verified against a mock Hornet ledger. The robin photo is illustrative: Alexis LOURS, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
A photo, a suggestion from an open-weight model, and a human who confirms or corrects it. The observer — not the model — signs.
The decision is hashed, Ed25519-signed, and chained to the record before it. The sealed journal is the source of truth.
Sync anchors a commitment — never the raw photo — to a ledger. Edit a queued record and the hashes stop recomputing: sync is refused.
Open biodiversity data is enormous: GBIF reports >3 billion species occurrence records published by ~2,300 institutions (GBIF, 2025). That is ecosystem context, not Vickrey usage — and nothing here claims those records lack provenance. It is the scale that makes tamper-evident field records worth having.
