1Eight million downloads since 2013, with 55 million daily connections by approximately 100,000 users from 171 different countries: the Pl@ntNet application, designed to identify a plant based on a simple photo, is a worldwide success. This success was born out of interactions between botanists, ecologists and agronomists from IRD, Cirad, Inra and the Tela Botanica community network, as well as the chance encounter, in 2008, between the director of an IRD botany unit and the head of an IT team at Inria, who at the time was working on software capable of analysing and comparing images. A decision was made to use a similar approach to create a collaborative platform allowing anyone to recognise and determine plants.

Flowering frangipani tree, Madagascar.

2The software initially took the form of a private website where Internet users could send their photos. In 2013 however, the application was put within everyone’s reach, with the first version of the smartphone application. At first, the application only covered the flora of Western Europe, before it was extended to other regions in 2015, including overseas and tropical regions. Entirely free and translated into nine languages, the application is fun to use and intended for the general public.

••• An application transforms citizens into custodians of plant biodiversity •••

Pl@ntNet application on a smartphone.

3It relies on a computer program and an extensive database of images. It is also underpinned by a network of botanists who contribute to the data validation process. In addition, every photo sent by users is geo-referenced, retained by the platform and added to an ever-expanding database which now features tens of millions of observations. A valuable resource for ecology studies, the monitoring of biodiversity and invasive plants.

4World leader in its field, Pl@ntNet has also developed an online game, The PlantGame, to allow as many people as possible to build skills in botany while contributing to validating images taken by users. This is an effective virtuous circle as the identification success rate exceeds 90%, for a total of 17,000 species listed in the database.