FlorID – A nationwide identification service for plants from photos and habitat information

Abstract

Citizen science has become key to biodiversity monitoring but critically depends on accurate quality control that is scalable and tailored to the focal region. We developed FlorID, a free-to-use identification service for all native and many non-native plants of Switzerland. FlorID can identify >3000 species, using vision transformers trained on 1.5M photos, and ecological predictions from multilayer perceptrons, trained on 6.7M occurrence observations and 20 high-resolution environmental variables. Embedded in a free-to-use application programming interface, FlorID can be accessed directly, via webservice, and via FlorApp smartphone application. If multiple images and spatiotemporal location are available, FlorID correctly identifies 93% of field observations and has a top-5 accuracy of 99%. Ecological predictions boost identification success especially for native species with distinct distributions. By evaluating information on appearance and fine-grained ecology, FlorID is a blueprint for similar solutions targeting different taxa or regions, and a basis for developments like automated community inventories.