‘Leafsnap’ Uses Recognition Software to Help You Identify Trees and Scientists to Study Their Distribution
Leafsnap is a mobile citizen science project and “Electronic Field Guide” aimed at helping citizens to learn about their natural surroundings by identifying plants with a single uploaded image of their leaves. Each image submitted by users is submitted to a database where its species information and geo-location are also used by scientists to study changes in distribution patterns as climate and pollination changes impact the local flora.
Leafsnap is a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. The free mobile apps use visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves. They contain beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruits, petioles, seeds and bark.
The original Leafsnap currently includes trees found in the Northeastern United States and Canada, and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States. The high-resolution images in the original app were created by the conservation organization. Finding Species.
This website shows the tree species included in Leafsnap, the collections of its users, and the team of research volunteers working to produce it.
The Leafsnap UK app includes trees from the United Kingdom with species information and imagery provided by the Natural History Museum in London. More information can be found on the Natural History Museum website.
The City College of New York developed and tested curricular materials that use the Leafsnap app to help middle school students notice, group, and contextualize street trees in the patterns of evolution. Curricular guide and other educational materials are available from here.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
