I can strongly recommend the mobile app Flora Incognita for quickly identifying plants. It’s made by one of the German universities so it’s free, don’t have ads, and don’t collect your personal data. I even showed it to my mum and she loves it

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pbhjpbhj 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I use iNaturalist for plants and animals, mostly insects (and Merlin for birdsong recognition).

No ads, non-profit, contribute to research, etc. It also allows you to find out what others have spotted in your area. I like the range maps, the images across seasons, and other seasonal information.

The actual ML-based recognition is somewhat hidden, I think that part of the UI needs some work; it seems like it was made for researchers first then hacked for non-experts to use.

https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about

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max-ch an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Besides the utility for users, Flora Incognita is also a massive crowdsourcing project for science: They use the GPS location of photos in combination with the identified plants to build a temporo-spatial database of confirmed plant sightings. (To my knowledge no link to any personal data of users.)

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kamma4434 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

+1 for Flora Incognita. This is what apps should be.

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dmos62 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Better than PlantNet?

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darkwater 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

PlantNet seems pretty open as well right? Looks like is from several public institutions so it should be ads and trackers free, can you confirm?

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sigmoid10 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

PlantNet covers everything, Flora is more central Europe focused and has a hard time with non-native plants.

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iammjm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I live next to a botanical garden which has climate-regulated glass domes with all sorts of non-native plants from around the world and it gets 90%+ of them right, but sometime you have to feed it different parts of the plant. PlantNet does look great too, I’ll have to check it out!

	▲	sigmoid10 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's a nice anecdote, but I didn't just make up this fact. According to their paper [1], Flora has 4851 supported species, while PlantNet covered 30,261 at the time. Flora also tends to mix up cultivated/ornamental plants with wild counterparts, so your perceived accuracy may be deceptive if you're not a botanist. So yes, it's a cute app if you are a walking outside in central Europe, but it's nowhere near PlantNet. [1] https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041...