4 Free Apps for Identifying Flowers, Plants, and Trees Around You

Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bumblebees. Four iOS and Android apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, meet all your ID needs free of charge. And every observation will advance scientific understanding of the natural world.

Merlin Bird ID uses a phone’s sensitive microphone to identify bird vocalizations in the sonic landscape around you, painting a visual representation or sonogram analogous to a musical score.

Seek by iNaturalist shoots live video, automatically grabbing frames and analyzing them. Then it identifies the taxonomy of plants and animals instantly as you shoot. If it cannot figure out the species, it will give you its best guess.

Both iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet are sophisticated apps that upload and analyze photographs of flora. In seconds, they typically return a ranked list of potential candidates with rich descriptions of each.

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4 Free Apps for Identifying Flowers, Plants, and Trees Around You

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