I mean its just a matter of total available data points. The more images people take and upload, the more material they have to train their models. And obviously there will be way less people running around the tropics taking pictures.
It’s honestly way more about plant diversity. There are a million different plants in like a ten square mile area that all look exactly like an aloe and are related. The only way to differentiate them is by hyper obscure differences like their root structure and what their sap consists of.
You don’t even need to be in the proper tropics. Walk around San Diego with a plant id app and watch it spit out a different name for the same palm tree over and over because there are actually hundreds of varietals of palm with similar extremely complex identification processes. Some with toxic fruit and some with edible fruit that look the same.
I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species. I would love to get a reply like “this could be any of the following species” instead of “im 23.232% sure that its this species”
I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species.
Most people are going to take photos of the leaves, stem or at best the outside of the flowers. These are rarely conserved within families. You’ll need the arrangement of the four floral whorls to name a family and expect any degree of accuracy. And that’s assuming your plant is an angiosperm.
How does Plantnet fare in tropics?
I mean its just a matter of total available data points. The more images people take and upload, the more material they have to train their models. And obviously there will be way less people running around the tropics taking pictures.
It’s honestly way more about plant diversity. There are a million different plants in like a ten square mile area that all look exactly like an aloe and are related. The only way to differentiate them is by hyper obscure differences like their root structure and what their sap consists of.
You don’t even need to be in the proper tropics. Walk around San Diego with a plant id app and watch it spit out a different name for the same palm tree over and over because there are actually hundreds of varietals of palm with similar extremely complex identification processes. Some with toxic fruit and some with edible fruit that look the same.
I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species. I would love to get a reply like “this could be any of the following species” instead of “im 23.232% sure that its this species”
Seek does that. That’s the reason it’s my go to ID app
the full inaturalist app also has you upload the observation and likely get suggested IDs from other people
Most people are going to take photos of the leaves, stem or at best the outside of the flowers. These are rarely conserved within families. You’ll need the arrangement of the four floral whorls to name a family and expect any degree of accuracy. And that’s assuming your plant is an angiosperm.
From my experience it’s quite good in the Caribbean and it’s getting better.
Cool, thanks for the info!