Useful Bird and Plant Identification Apps

[otherclive]

This weekend we went to Wales and spent some time in an area of Temperate Rain Forest, of which Wales has some of the country’s remaining areas. My son had two apps which came in really useful. Plant. Net allows plants to be identified via the phones camera. It can log your location so the parent institute builds up a picture of where the species are located. This app is funded by the French government.

The other app by Cornell Labs is Merlin ID for bird identification. It listens to bird songs where you are then offer’s the species identification. Must say it was very accurate both in the rain forest reserve and the area of woodland our son has. You can also select a bird species and play its song on the phone to try and encourage birds nearby to respond.

Both apps are approved to download from the app stores.

Identify, explore and share your observations of wild plants

Pl@ntNet is a tool to help to identify plants with pictures.

identify.plantnet.org

Merlin Bird ID - Home

Bird ID Wizard—Step-by-step Answer three simple questions about a bird you are trying to identify and Merlin will give you a list of possible matches. Merlin offers quick identification help for all levels of bird watchers and outdoor enthusiasts to help you learn about the birds in any country i

merlin.allaboutbirds.org

 

[Buckman]

I had the plant app which is good when it worked, but found that in rural areas where signal is poor the app for obvious reasons could not function. If we had decent 3 or 4G coverage in rural areas, it would be brilliant. At the time if you took a picture of the plant, you could not access the photo via the app to identify the plant, but that may now have changed?

 

[JTQ]

I use "Seek" on my android, I am quite impressed how good it can often be, and amazed how these mega brains can write such software.