6 ms·

Open and Free Plant Identification API

214 points by animal_spirits 4y ago

nraynaud 4y ago
I have used this website a few times, I’m not a plant expert, but I found the results credible.
moffkalast 4y ago
Amazing, it identified all of my plants correctly except one. Now I have to go out and see what it finds in the wild.
giantg2 4y ago
Is there something free and similar for mushrooms?
- shelbel 4y ago
  iNaturalist does so for all kingdoms of life. Accuracy, of course, is not perfect.
- chestervonwinch 4y ago
  I use seek by inaturalist for plant identification [0]. It claims to support fungi identification also, but I have not used it for that personally. It's a very popular app, so perhaps someone else will offer their direct experience using it with fungi. [0]: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
  - dunham 4y ago
    About two years ago, I posted mushrooms twice on iNaturalist (not Seek) and quickly got updates with a more specific identity from other users, so I think there is an active community out there. They were amanita muscaria -> american amanita muscaria and oyster mushroom -> summer oyster mushroom. The only non-mushroom confirmation / corrections I've gotten on iNaturalist were a spider and a snail. That said, it may be tricky to get a good identity on mushrooms. There are some varieties need spore prints or very careful attention to structure to identify.
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  Mushroom Observer is the first that comes to mind, it doesn’t have an identification api but it does have tons of training data to build your own model https://mushroomobserver.org/articles/20 https://mushroomobserver.org/articles/20
sega_sai 4y ago
Plantnet is great. There is also a similar app for bird song identification -- BirdNet.
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  I recently started using the Merlin iOS app to identify birdsongs and it works really well.
ewuhic 4y ago
It would have been nice if they also provided info about the state of the plant you've got, e.g. needs more/less water, sun, etc. I've got a payed app called PictureThis, which often misidentifies the plants, however have extensible sections for care and problem diagnosis and mitigation. I, however, cannot confirm if those are trustworthy, but it helped me cure some of my plants. Hope this foss API (alongside their mobile clients) would expand with such info.
tortillasauce 4y ago
For species native to Europe there's the ObsIdentify app as well. It identifies not only plants, but birds, insects, mushrooms and other species groups too. (disclaimer: I work there)
ta988 4y ago
I've been using it for a while it is extremely efficient and precise even with bad pictures.
nmlt 4y ago
There is also the German project flora incognita. https://floraincognita.com/ https://floraincognita.com/
causality0 4y ago
Plantnet is cool, but there's a lot of missed potential for adding discrimination questions. For example, when the result isn't clear-cut, it could ask you the standard identification questions and narrow it down to a specific species instead of making you guess based on photos.
- agilob 4y ago
  That's correct, there's plenty of incorrectly identified plants, but the app says 89% accuracy for the first result and 11% for the second, so it's hard to argue. I've many times encountered plants that don't in live in the UK but the app say they do.
  - causality0 4y ago
    The high accuracy results are not always, well, accurate. Several times I've had an 85+ percent result then looked closer and gone "ah shit, the leaf pattern is wrong, these are alternating instead of side-by-side" or similar.
  - 7952 4y ago
    Inaturalist uses GPS and date to help with this. So it shouldn't show you stinging nettles in November.
- riffraff 4y ago
  when I was in school we had something called "dychotomic keys" which were big books to recognize plants with binary questions. Does it have a leaves? yes/no go to page XXX/YYY Is the leaf oblong? go to page WWW/ZZZ Is the border smooth? go to.. I wish there was a plant identification app using _that_ system, it would be much more entertaining and educational to use.
  - TheaomBen 4y ago
    I've been meaning to take a crack at a software version of this for insects/birds/plants, do you know of any good ideally libre sources for the data?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jxramos 4y ago
Is this what iOS photos uses under the hood when it goes into plant detection mode? I was photographing some bugs on a plant in the garden yesterday and noticed a leaf annotation on the photo. It was accurate with the “Siri knowledge result” of cucumis. I wonder if Apple is contributing to this repository as it did with Open Street Maps if I understood that history correctly.
- knolan 4y ago
  I had to switch my iPhone’s region from Ireland to the US (and back again) for this feature to turn on. It’s pretty nifty.
  - neuronic 4y ago
    It came with the iOS 15.4 update iirc. For me (Germany) it just worked.
    - knolan 4y ago
      Ireland isn’t currently listed as a supported country. It appears to have stopped working shortly after restoring to my region. https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#visual-look-up-visual-look-up https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#visual-look-... Visual Look Up English (United States) English (Australia) English (Canada) English (Indonesia) English (Singapore) English (United Kingdom) French (France) German (Germany) Italian (Italy) Spanish (Spain) Spanish (Mexico) Spanish (United States)
      - raffraffraff 4y ago
        The feckers
murphyslab 4y ago
It's great that citizen science space for collecting ecological or biodiversity data is is growing. I'm curious why the consortium members behind Pl@ntNet are all French. Compare that to iNaturalist, which features partner organizations in 21 countries. That kind of widespread buy-in is attractive and I'm not sure what is limiting Pl@ntNet: - https://plantnet.org/en/plntnet-consortium/ https://plantnet.org/en/plntnet-consortium/ - https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network Personally I've found iNaturalist to be the optimum for me since it partners with 4 major Canadian organizations; it allows for local conservation authorities to have access to location data for vulnerable species observation. It's also every branch of the tree of life, not just plants, so it's allowed me to learn to identify more kinds of species.
- nthypes 4y ago
  The PlantNet Consortium is mostly made up of French organizations, which may be why it hasn't gained as much traction internationally. However, it's still a valuable resource for plant identification and data collection.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  Biggest issue with inaturalist is the extremely limited scope of their api. I'll be checking this one out, but inaturalist is extremely tight fisted with both their data and the service, which is extremely disappointing.There is a wide range of utility that could be built on it's back if it were open source.
  - morphle 4y ago
    Sadly, this tendency to keep the data proprietary instead of open is found in almost all projects, ususally because of simple US or European copyright reasons. There are ways around this, for example in other countries the copyrights have expired, the copyrights don't always apply, people can be contacted and asked to waive copyrights and new pictures could be made to replace the copyrighted ones, etc. You can 'quote' much of the copyrighted material. There have been government (over)rulings of copyrights. All that implies work that the citizen scientists can do as well.

nraynaud 4y ago

I have used this website a few times, I’m not a plant expert, but I found the results credible.

moffkalast 4y ago

Amazing, it identified all of my plants correctly except one. Now I have to go out and see what it finds in the wild.

giantg2 4y ago

Is there something free and similar for mushrooms?

shelbel 4y ago
iNaturalist does so for all kingdoms of life. Accuracy, of course, is not perfect.
chestervonwinch 4y ago
I use seek by inaturalist for plant identification [0]. It claims to support fungi identification also, but I have not used it for that personally. It's a very popular app, so perhaps someone else will offer their direct experience using it with fungi. [0]: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
- dunham 4y ago
  About two years ago, I posted mushrooms twice on iNaturalist (not Seek) and quickly got updates with a more specific identity from other users, so I think there is an active community out there. They were amanita muscaria -> american amanita muscaria and oyster mushroom -> summer oyster mushroom. The only non-mushroom confirmation / corrections I've gotten on iNaturalist were a spider and a snail. That said, it may be tricky to get a good identity on mushrooms. There are some varieties need spore prints or very careful attention to structure to identify.
animal_spirits 4y ago
Mushroom Observer is the first that comes to mind, it doesn’t have an identification api but it does have tons of training data to build your own model https://mushroomobserver.org/articles/20 https://mushroomobserver.org/articles/20

sega_sai 4y ago

Plantnet is great. There is also a similar app for bird song identification -- BirdNet.

animal_spirits 4y ago
I recently started using the Merlin iOS app to identify birdsongs and it works really well.

ewuhic 4y ago

It would have been nice if they also provided info about the state of the plant you've got, e.g. needs more/less water, sun, etc. I've got a payed app called PictureThis, which often misidentifies the plants, however have extensible sections for care and problem diagnosis and mitigation. I, however, cannot confirm if those are trustworthy, but it helped me cure some of my plants. Hope this foss API (alongside their mobile clients) would expand with such info.

tortillasauce 4y ago

For species native to Europe there's the ObsIdentify app as well. It identifies not only plants, but birds, insects, mushrooms and other species groups too. (disclaimer: I work there)

ta988 4y ago

I've been using it for a while it is extremely efficient and precise even with bad pictures.

nmlt 4y ago

There is also the German project flora incognita. https://floraincognita.com/ https://floraincognita.com/

causality0 4y ago

Plantnet is cool, but there's a lot of missed potential for adding discrimination questions. For example, when the result isn't clear-cut, it could ask you the standard identification questions and narrow it down to a specific species instead of making you guess based on photos.

agilob 4y ago
That's correct, there's plenty of incorrectly identified plants, but the app says 89% accuracy for the first result and 11% for the second, so it's hard to argue. I've many times encountered plants that don't in live in the UK but the app say they do.
- causality0 4y ago
  The high accuracy results are not always, well, accurate. Several times I've had an 85+ percent result then looked closer and gone "ah shit, the leaf pattern is wrong, these are alternating instead of side-by-side" or similar.
- 7952 4y ago
  Inaturalist uses GPS and date to help with this. So it shouldn't show you stinging nettles in November.
riffraff 4y ago
when I was in school we had something called "dychotomic keys" which were big books to recognize plants with binary questions. Does it have a leaves? yes/no go to page XXX/YYY Is the leaf oblong? go to page WWW/ZZZ Is the border smooth? go to.. I wish there was a plant identification app using _that_ system, it would be much more entertaining and educational to use.
- TheaomBen 4y ago
  I've been meaning to take a crack at a software version of this for insects/birds/plants, do you know of any good ideally libre sources for the data?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jxramos 4y ago

Is this what iOS photos uses under the hood when it goes into plant detection mode? I was photographing some bugs on a plant in the garden yesterday and noticed a leaf annotation on the photo. It was accurate with the “Siri knowledge result” of cucumis. I wonder if Apple is contributing to this repository as it did with Open Street Maps if I understood that history correctly.

knolan 4y ago
I had to switch my iPhone’s region from Ireland to the US (and back again) for this feature to turn on. It’s pretty nifty.
- neuronic 4y ago
  It came with the iOS 15.4 update iirc. For me (Germany) it just worked.
  - knolan 4y ago
    Ireland isn’t currently listed as a supported country. It appears to have stopped working shortly after restoring to my region. https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#visual-look-up-visual-look-up https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#visual-look-... Visual Look Up English (United States) English (Australia) English (Canada) English (Indonesia) English (Singapore) English (United Kingdom) French (France) German (Germany) Italian (Italy) Spanish (Spain) Spanish (Mexico) Spanish (United States)
    - raffraffraff 4y ago
      The feckers

murphyslab 4y ago

It's great that citizen science space for collecting ecological or biodiversity data is is growing. I'm curious why the consortium members behind Pl@ntNet are all French. Compare that to iNaturalist, which features partner organizations in 21 countries. That kind of widespread buy-in is attractive and I'm not sure what is limiting Pl@ntNet: - https://plantnet.org/en/plntnet-consortium/ https://plantnet.org/en/plntnet-consortium/ - https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network https://www.inaturalist.org/sites/network Personally I've found iNaturalist to be the optimum for me since it partners with 4 major Canadian organizations; it allows for local conservation authorities to have access to location data for vulnerable species observation. It's also every branch of the tree of life, not just plants, so it's allowed me to learn to identify more kinds of species.

nthypes 4y ago
The PlantNet Consortium is mostly made up of French organizations, which may be why it hasn't gained as much traction internationally. However, it's still a valuable resource for plant identification and data collection.
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
Biggest issue with inaturalist is the extremely limited scope of their api. I'll be checking this one out, but inaturalist is extremely tight fisted with both their data and the service, which is extremely disappointing.There is a wide range of utility that could be built on it's back if it were open source.
- morphle 4y ago
  Sadly, this tendency to keep the data proprietary instead of open is found in almost all projects, ususally because of simple US or European copyright reasons. There are ways around this, for example in other countries the copyrights have expired, the copyrights don't always apply, people can be contacted and asked to waive copyrights and new pictures could be made to replace the copyrighted ones, etc. You can 'quote' much of the copyrighted material. There have been government (over)rulings of copyrights. All that implies work that the citizen scientists can do as well.