![]() Taxonomists are asking for more efficient methods to meet identification requirements. With the continuous loss of biodiversity, the demand for routine species identification is likely to further increase, while at the same time, the number of experienced experts is limited and declining. Many activities, such as studying the biodiversity of a region, monitoring populations of endangered species, determining the impact of climate change on species distribution, payment of environmental services, and weed control actions are dependent upon accurate identification skills. The dilemma is exacerbated since accurate plant identification is essential for ecological monitoring and thereby especially for biodiversity conservation. As a consequence, taxonomic knowledge and plant identification skills are restricted to a limited number of persons today. In addition to the complexity of the task itself, taxonomic information is often captured in languages and formats hard to understand without specialized knowledge. Given the average 20,000 word vocabulary of an educated native English speaker, even teaching and learning the "taxon vocabulary" of a restricted region becomes a long-term endeavor. Current estimates of flowering plant species (angiosperms) range between 220,000 and 420,000. The world inherits a very large number of plant species. Since no two plants look exactly the same, it requires a certain degree of generalization to assign individuals to species (or, in other words, assign objects to a fuzzy prototype). Individuals of the same species share a combination of relevant identification features. ![]() Qualitative characters are features such as leaf shape, flower color, or ovary position. Quantitative characters are features that can be counted or measured, such as plant height, flower width, or the number of petals per flower. These underlying characters can be qualitative or quantitative. This article specifically focuses on plant identification, which is the process of assigning an individual plant to a taxon based on the resemblance of discriminatory and morphological plant characters, ultimately arriving at a species or infraspecific name. The assignment of an unknown living thing to a taxon is called identification. ![]() Biology defines taxa as formal classes of living things consisting of the taxon's name and its description. Despite the variation of organisms, a more experienced eye soon discerns that organisms can be grouped into taxa. One of the most obvious features of organic life is its remarkable diversity. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: We are funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) grants: 01LC1319A and 01LC1319B ( ) the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) grant: 3514 685C19 ( ) and the Stiftung Naturschutz Thüringen (SNT) grant: SNT-082-248-03/2014 ( ). PLoS Comput Biol 14(4):Įditor: Alexander Bucksch, University of Georgia Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, UNITED STATESĬopyright: © 2018 Wäldchen et al. We review the technical status quo on computer vision approaches for plant species identification, highlight the main research challenges to overcome in providing applicable tools, and conclude with a discussion of open and future research thrusts.Ĭitation: Wäldchen J, Rzanny M, Seeland M, Mäder P (2018) Automated plant species identification-Trends and future directions. In recent years, computer science research, especially image processing and pattern recognition techniques, have been introduced into plant taxonomy to eventually make up for the deficiency in people's identification abilities. This creates a hard-to-overcome hurdle for novices interested in acquiring species knowledge. But the identification of plants by conventional means is difficult, time consuming, and (due to the use of specific botanical terms) frustrating for novices. It is required or useful for large parts of society, from professionals (such as landscape architects, foresters, farmers, conservationists, and biologists) to the general public (like ecotourists, hikers, and nature lovers). Plant identification is not exclusively the job of botanists and plant ecologists.
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