[HN Gopher] Open and Free Plant Identification API
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Open and Free Plant Identification API
Author : animal_spirits
Score : 188 points
Date : 2022-05-28 03:58 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plantnet.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (plantnet.org)
| ewuhic wrote:
| 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.
| ta988 wrote:
| I've been using it for a while it is extremely efficient and
| precise even with bad pictures.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Is there something free and similar for mushrooms?
| chestervonwinch wrote:
| 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
| dunham wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| shelbel wrote:
| iNaturalist does so for all kingdoms of life. Accuracy, of
| course, is not perfect.
| nraynaud wrote:
| I have used this website a few times, I'm not a plant expert, but
| I found the results credible.
| nmlt wrote:
| There is also the German project flora incognita.
|
| https://floraincognita.com/
| moffkalast wrote:
| Amazing, it identified all of my plants correctly except one. Now
| I have to go out and see what it finds in the wild.
| sega_sai wrote:
| Plantnet is great. There is also a similar app for bird song
| identification -- BirdNet.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I recently started using the Merlin iOS app to identify
| birdsongs and it works really well.
| causality0 wrote:
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| 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.
| abibibo wrote:
| For woody plants, VTree might fit what you're looking for.
| It's a dychotomic key optionally augmented by your location
| data.
|
| https://dendro.cnre.vt.edu/dendrology/vtree.htm
| TheaomBen wrote:
| 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?
| stevesearer wrote:
| The US Department of Fish and Wildlife has a really useful
| service called the Feather Atlas for identifying bird
| feathers by their color, size, and shape:
|
| https://www.fws.gov/lab/featheratlas/idtool.php
| morphle wrote:
| I'd be willing to help you. The largest dychotomic key [1]
| is partially digitised but we could transform it into a
| proper dataset. Copyright no longer applies to part on the
| Flora. There are many other sources. I remember dychotomic
| key in hypercard [2].
|
| Scanning 81 million science paper pdfs will yield most of
| the data in [1] and [2]. It would be possible to get a
| grant to make these transformations and add them to
| Plantnet and iNaturalist.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Europaea
|
| [2] http://www.etibioinformatics.nl/faq/
| agilob wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Inaturalist uses GPS and date to help with this. So it
| shouldn't show you stinging nettles in November.
| tortillasauce wrote:
| 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)
| murphyslab wrote:
| 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://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.
| 7952 wrote:
| My hunch is that Inaturalist gets traction because it is
| social, which makes it fun, which makes it successful.
| nthypes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jxramos wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It came with the iOS 15.4 update iirc. For me (Germany) it
| just worked.
| knolan wrote:
| 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-...
|
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| raffraffraff wrote:
| The feckers
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(page generated 2022-05-28 23:02 UTC)