This article originally appeared in the February 2025 edition of Hunter Valley Group Newsletter “Gumleaves”
In addition to plant books and reference keys, there are many on-line & technology options that can be used to help to identify native bushland plants. I’ll share those that I make the most use of.
When trying to identify plants, it helps to capture some basic details. The right details can be of great assistance in later identifying the plant. It can be very frustrating when, sometime later, you are trying to identify from a photo, and you realise that you have not captured some key identifying feature.
Some of the things to look for and observe are –
- flowers – the starting point for most plant identification
- fruit – particularly useful for plants with persistent fruit – e.g. eucalypts & hakeas
- leaves – shape, size and arrangement
- habit – i.e. ground cover, shrub, tree, climber, aquatic
- locality & habitat – where the plant is found growing can considerably narrow the possible choices
- bark, buds & any other features that look distinctive
With the above in mind I try to get a good photo or two of the flowers & another of the whole plant. With current high resolution cameras, you can usually zoom in to see the leaves & other features.
Plant Net
This is the NSW Herbarium site, along with botanical plant descriptions, it has botanical keys to all of the plants in NSW. It is also the place to confirm plant names for NSW. As it is a more technical site it can be difficult to use.
I often go to the key for a genus (click on the genus name) to look at some of the alternatives in the key.
Australasian Virtual Herbarium
This site holds herbarium records for all of Australasia. for each species there are maps that show where the herbarium specimen was collected. This is very useful for confirming what plants are in the area that you are looking at. Also when you click on a dot on the map, it shows the collection details and allows you to go to the actual collection record. As these are vouchered herbarium records, the identification of the specimens is excellent.
If you have a plant and know what genus it belongs to (i.e. Banksia), you can search on the genus & the map will show all records for that genus. I then zoom into the area I’m interested in & click on the dots to see what species in that genus are in the area.
Bio Net Atlas
The NSW Government biodiversity survey results. – often the surveys required for development applications. This has more detailed maps with many more data points than the Virtual Herbarium, but as these are observations and not vouchered herbarium records, the quality of the data may not be as good. Also, the coverage is better nearer to towns and major development areas.
iNaturalist
INaturalist is a global database of plant and animal observations. It relies on photographic records submitted by people from all around the world and as such is a rich photographic record of these observations. It allows for searching by species or by area and is a good way to see what is in an area.
If you can sign up to an account in INaturalist, you can add observations to the database. It also has smartphone apps that will automatically record the co-ordinates for any observations added from your phone.
For observations to be verified as “Research Grade”, it requires one other person to verify the identification. Unfortunately this can be anyone & with “the wisdom of the crowd” may not always be correct. Also being an international database it does not respect the local herbarium naming standards. e.g. There are no Callistemons or Calothamnos in iNaturalist – they are bundled into Melaleuca.
Smartphone Apps
There are a number of different smartphone apps around that use AI for plant identification. This includes options for identifying within the phone’s camera app as well. These often make claims about being able to correctly identify plants from a single photo. Whilst they can be OK with common garden plants, they do poorly on most of our native plants. As indicated earlier a single photo may not have all of the key details to help identify the plant. Often they will get it right or close, but equally the results can be spectacularly wrong. e.g. Kennedia rubicunda was identified as an Erica, or a Coral Tree
It is best to treat the results from these AI lookups as suggestions that can help in narrowing down what the plant is. Confirmation should always be sought from another source.
