arXiv:2611.16538 · v1

Pl@ntNet machine-to-machine identification service with Pl@ntNet API: enabling automated biodiversity monitoring through large-scale plant identification

首次提交 2026-11-12 17:33

版本更新 2026-11-12 17:33

雷达观测 2026-11-13 14:15

摘要

1. Monitoring plant biodiversity requires identifying large numbers of plants across space and time. Although artificial intelligence (AI) can now identify plant species from images with high accuracy, most existing systems rely on users manually submitting images. As ecological monitoring increasingly generates large image collections from cameras, drones, robots and online platforms, there is a growing need for plant identification services that can be directly integrated into automated data-processing workflows. 2. Here, we present Pl@ntNet's machine-to-machine AI plant identification service. This service uses an application programming interface (API) to provide programmatic access to Pl@ntNet's plant recognition models and the associated taxonomic processing. This service enables the implementation of automated identification workflows without human intervention and can thus directly link large image collections and automated observation systems to an AI-based plant identification system. 3. We establish that this service, which covers 85,000 species from around the world, (1) has a species prediction accuracy of 0.89, (2) process images up to 666 times faster than workflows requiring human intervention, (3) and has processed over 84 million identification requests since its launch, including more than 40 million in 2025 alone. We demonstrate how it has already enabled the implementation of a new generation of ecological workflows: identifying plants from images of insects to reconstruct the plant-pollinator interactions, analysing geolocated images from social media to study plant distribution, detecting invasive plants using images taken at the roadside, and identifying weeds using agricultural robots. Finally, we illustrate its application using a reproducible example: identifying plants from insect photos on iNaturalist. In approximately 30 min on a standard laptop, 2,424 images were processed to generate a dataset of 708 plant-pollinator interactions, with a weighted precision of 0.98 for flower detection and an accuracy of 0.88 for genus plant identification. 4. In conclusion, this machine-to-machine species identification is already operating on a considerable scale and meets a genuine need. All of this paves the way for a new paradigm in biodiversity monitoring, in which automated sensors and image collections can be directly connected to AI-based identification services.