I send things too iNaturalist all the time, it's great, it really helped me learn about my local fauna. I want to do a project with their API to identify a couple hundred wildflower photos I've been hoarding. Would that work? ( Idea is my wildflower app could send to their models to confirm my original identification)

Hey, good news! Pollination ecologist + ML guy here; with open models coming soon.

You can keep an eye on (gh) polli-labs/linnaeus (a bit stale; I'll rebase on my private repo later tonight-). There's some cool ideas in here to exploit the structure of taxonomic hierarchies to help the model approach recognition how a professional taxonomist might.. so working from coarse to fine, taxonomy-guided label smoothing (distributing alpha mass by taxonomic distance)..and (forthcoming) RL on expert consensus to teach abstention (if an expert could only identify a specimen to genus for some set of inputs; then our model should abstain from a species classification for the same inputs). Unfortunately I am very, very compute-constrained- but shooting for late April/first week of May for insect + flowering plant models. (Other taxa will come later; probably as unified model). I'm working on camera-based (automated) ecological monitoring systems for ~6yrs at this point; it's a really fun problem space! dropped out of grad school to go all-in on automating my favorite job I ever had (pollination ecology field research..watching flowers for visitations!); since I knew I'd always be a mediocre ecologist- but an engineer that happens to care about ecology could be very very valuable to my field.

a taxa recognition model turns out to be only a small piece of the system you need to extract structured observational data from cameras in the field :-) Working with one of my partners right now to launch a really cool demo of what's possible these days- Texas folks especially; keep an eye out on wildflower.org around May 1!

I'll spill more ink soon but (anyone) please get in touch if you find these things interesting. Or if you'd like to help me out with compute/expenses!

I don't know if it will work, but Pl@ntNet Identify (which I use often) seems to have an API: https://docs.plantnet.org/en/reference/api-plantnet/

I've wanted to do something similar, but unfortunately their CV model isn't public and can't be used through their API.