“Haha Google says this is safe, I’ll try it”
“Why is my entire skin numb”
How does Plantnet fare in tropics?
From my experience it’s quite good in the Caribbean and it’s getting better.
I mean its just a matter of total available data points. The more images people take and upload, the more material they have to train their models. And obviously there will be way less people running around the tropics taking pictures.
It’s honestly way more about plant diversity. There are a million different plants in like a ten square mile area that all look exactly like an aloe and are related. The only way to differentiate them is by hyper obscure differences like their root structure and what their sap consists of.
You don’t even need to be in the proper tropics. Walk around San Diego with a plant id app and watch it spit out a different name for the same palm tree over and over because there are actually hundreds of varietals of palm with similar extremely complex identification processes. Some with toxic fruit and some with edible fruit that look the same.
I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species. I would love to get a reply like “this could be any of the following species” instead of “im 23.232% sure that its this species”
Try iNaturalist, it works pretty well. Also, learn plant morphology, makes it easier to narrow things down when you get a couple suggestions within the same genus or family.
Indeed, basic plant morphology knowledge plus some local Floras and iNaturalist worked out quite well for me in the tropics. There are also so many people that know plants on iNat. You only get into trouble if you try to ID rare species, but that’s also the case in the temperate zones.
Same here for the southern hemisphere. Google lens has no clue.