I grew up in the woods, surrounded by deciduous trees. As years went on, the Dogwoods, Oaks, and Magnolias became as familiar as good friends, but now that I live in Southern California, I'm totally naive again.
Enter--LeafSnap app: an iPhone app that identifies trees based on pictures of their leafs. I may be older, but I'm no less in love with technology. Just snap a pic of that three-leafed suspect or beautiful bouquet on your hiking trail, upload it to LeafSnap, and the app will compare it to thousands of high res pics of leafs in its database. Then, you have an opportunity to put a name with your mysterious member of Plantae.
Smithsonian Institute did the identification, collection, and photography of all the plant species in the database, and let me tell you--the pictures are beautiful. Behind the electronic field guide is a sophisticated visual recognition algorithms built by researchers at Columbia University and University of Maryland. In a nut shell, it works by finding the outline of the leaf in your picture, measuring its shape at various points along its edge, and returning the best matches in it's database. You get to make the final call as to which species matches best.
So, next time you hit the trails, get in touch with your inner techno-horticulturist:
oh my goodness that is so very awesome. downloading now.
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