Trailside: An Offline Field Guide Powered by Gemma 4, Ollama and Open Weights

Trailside and Guardabosque are offline nature guides developed for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge. Both applications utilize Gemma 4 running locally via Ollama on laptops to identify plants and animals without internet access. Trailside features a field journal and interactive look-up challenges for users. Guardabosque specifically targets the jungles of Tabasco, Mexico, allowing users to identify local wildlife like toucans and iguanas in remote areas where cloud-dependent identification apps typically fail to function.