Artificial intelligence identifies plant species by looking at them via Boing Boing

There have been several apps that perform similar AI matching and each of them gets better with every iteration. Often they are good enough to get you into the right botanical ballpark so you can do more traditional research from there. That can significantly reduce the amount of time required to figure out exactly what plant you have in hand — Douglas

Machine learning algorithms have successfully identified plant species in massive herbaria just by looking at the dried specimens. According to researchers, similar AI approaches could also be used identify the likes of fly larvae and plant fossils.

From Nature:

There are roughly 3,000 herbaria in the world, hosting an estimated 350 million specimens — only a fraction of which has been digitized. But the swelling data sets, along with advances in computing techniques, enticed computer scientist Erick Mata-Montero of the Costa Rica Institute of Technology in Cartago and botanist, Pierre Bonnet of the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development in Montpellier, to see what they could make of the data.