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June 08, 2011

New iPhone App Identifies Trees with a Photograph of the Leaf

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

If you’re a nature lover, but not always so clear on which tree is which, you may be saved from having to thumb through nature books in the future. Leafsnap is the first mobile app that can identify a plant from a photograph of the plant’s leaf. The free iPhone (News - Alert) and iPad app searches a comprehensive library of leaf images collected by the Smithsonian Institution, reported the Associated Press (News - Alert).



Users can take a photo of a leaf with their smartphone or iPad, and within a few seconds, the app returns information on the name of the plant or tree, and high-resolution photographs and information on the tree’s flowers, fruit, seeds and bark. The app seeks confirmation from the user (“yes, that’s the same plant”). Once this positive identification is made, the information is added to the app’s database.

Leafsnap, which “knows” all the trees in New York’s Central Park and Washington’s Rock Creek Park, was downloaded by more than 150,000 mobile nature lovers in the first month alone, and its creators expect it to continue to grow as it expands to Android (News - Alert) phones in the future.

By this summer, it is expected to include all the trees of the Northeast, and will eventually have all the trees of North America in its database.

Smithsonian research botanist John Kress, who created the app with engineers from Columbia University and the University of Maryland, told the Associated Press that the idea was originally conceived in 2003 as a high-tech aid for scientists to discover new species in unknown habitats. The project evolved, though, with the emergence of smartphones to become a new way for citizens to contribute to research.

“This is going to be able to populate a database of every tree in the United States,” Kress said. “I mean that’s millions and millions and millions of trees, so that would be really neat.”

It might also keep the city folk from rolling in the poison ivy.

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Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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