Flora incognita: AI-supported plant identification meets citizen science

The global loss of biodiversity is among the most urgent environmental problems of our time. Ongoing conservation efforts require an accurate understanding of spatiotemporal patterns of biodiversity and their change over time. Biodiversity monitoring is a labour-intensive task, heavily relying on individual expertise to correctly identify species in the field. In-situ species identification is almost impossible for untrained people and challenging even for professionals. The situation is further aggravated by the increasing shortage of skilled taxonomists. For these reasons, there has long been interest in developing automated species identification systems. Recent boosts in data availability accompanied by substantial progress in machine learning algorithms, notably deep convolutional neural networks, pushed these approaches to a ‘production-ready’ state. Automated species identification can now significantly contribute to biodiversity and conservation research. The project partner at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and Technische Universität Ilmenau developed the Flora Incognita, an app for automated plant identification. The lecture will give an insight into the developed technology and show perspectives on how automated plant identification can contribute to biodiversity monitoring.