Easy ID app for plants & birds

Imagine being able to readily identify every plant, animal and bird in your garden, on a hike or when showing off our beautiful country to visiting family and friends.

Anew app, developed by a group of New Zealand researchers can let you do just that.

Members of the TAIAO project at Waikato and Canterbury universities have used a data set of more than one million identified images to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify Aotearoa’s plants, animals and fungi. It’s the first tool tailor-made for Aotearoa wildlife and plant species.

The programme recognises unique features in photos of species large and small, from Hector’s dolphins to striated ants, and returns the scientific name, common names, and other related classifications, including Māori names where available.

The Aotearoa Species Classifier app can also identify wildlife wherever the user is, even without an internet connection. For those who wish to delve deeper at home, there’s an additional web classifier with more powerful models and tools.

PhD student Hongyu Wang and research programmer Paul Schlumbom developed the models and software and are continuing to work on the project. Paul says they have discovered some unexpected benefits.

“Because we have drawn data from a range of sources, the app is also able to identify pests, which means action can be taken to remove or destroy dangerous pests straight away,” Paul says.

A probability prediction is included in the identification with alternatives if there is any doubt about the likelihood of the species identified.

Hongyu says this ensures the integrity of the data. “We can say that normally the confidence is quite high, but with rare species the model might have more trouble. So you can check the top five possibilities if the confidence is not super high.”

The Aotearoa Species Classifier app is available in the App store now and on Google Play later this year.