Dr M’s mission to discover the best plant ID aids continues, and recently stumbled upon (for that is how the internet often works!) a nice post by Michelle Slatella on the US Gardenista website reviewing apps for plant ID.
As Michelle notes, there are now botanical apps which aim to help people identify plants – Michelle says there are “zillions” but I think that is an overestimate!
She mentions amongst these “zillions”, electronic field guides such Leafsnap, NatureGate, iPflanzen and Google Goggles.
To see how well the apps work, Michelle spent a day with her daughters playing CSI: Plant Detective!
Michelle went outside with her daughters to collect leaves and flowers from different species in the garden, then they downloaded four free plant identification apps and tested them on the bucket of plants they had gathered.
How did they do? Well you can read what they learned here.
Dr M says: Leafsnap seems to have a rather effective algorithm for identifying species from the leaf shape and so Leafsnap is a good way to confirm your identifications. But there is only limited botanical learning potential to be gained from just photographing a leaf!
Dr M adds: Leafsnap includes a wide range of species from the Eastern US and the this is apparently set to grow (see full list here).
Dr M notes: As yet Leafsnap has not yet been developed for UK species specifically and although it can be good for planted exotic species in the UK, there is currently only limited scope for using it to identify UK native trees.
Dr M says watch this space for a guest blog post reviewing Leafsnap and other plant ID apps.
You can watch the official leafsnap video here
January 11, 2014
