OLolivierlacan·Jul 27, 2021
Understandably people are realizing that it's now much easier to discover what plants (and animals, and fungus, etc.) exist around you and whether they're special in some way.
But when picking apps to accomplish that task, I suggest selecting for those that respect your privacy (because a lot of these plant observations involve GPS location), are clear about how the machine learning datasets are trained and what's being done with the data you're supplying, and lastly how these apps and companies are funded.
PictureThis is owned by https://www.glority.com
Candide appears to be a UK startup: https://candidegardening.com/GB/about
iNaturalist and their Seek app (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app) is a joint venture between the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about
Read the rest
Moreover both iNaturalist (https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist) and Seek (https://github.com/inaturalist/SeekReactNative) are open source. The former is a Rails app, and the latter a React Native app with no account registration system making it safe and legal to use for children since all observations are stored in-device by default unless you chose to send them to your iNaturalist account to share with the community.
On functionality alone it's extremely rare for Seek not to recognize an organism (yeah, it's not just plants) and when it is, I simply send the observation to iNaturalist whose network of naturalists both amateur and professional usually manage to definitively identify my observations within a few hours. Here's a recent example: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86844469
The iNaturalist community itself is fascinating and quite transparent with detailed site stats (https://www.inaturalist.org/stats) and a clear mission statement ( https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/what+is+it):
> iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature
At a time where biodiversity is more threatened than ever, I welcome any tool to help folks identify and value the organisms around us, but if you're going to pick one, my recommendation is iNat & Seek.
PS: I'm not affiliated to iNaturalist in any way other than as a happy user.