A long time ago, when I used to go for a morning walk along the beach in California, I frequently came across some strange looking fruits hanging from trees. At that time, I asked people about it but could not get any answer. I even posted its picture on Twitter but found no explanation. In the end, my friends named it “wild orange” because it looked like orange but had a larger size.
In those days, if we had to identify a rare plant that we encountered somewhere, we had to send its details to a large university to get it identified. But these days, things have become much easier because of the apps like PlantNet Plan Identification.
This app makes it as easy to identify any plant as snapping its picture. After installing this app, we can launch it and then tap on the camera icon. Then we have to take picture of the plant or its parts. As soon as you take the picture, it asks you to pick which part of the plant it belongs to – leaf, fruit, flower, bark, habit or others.
When you pick one of these categories, it then scans its online database to match your picture. A possible match is found within seconds, and then you can see the plant name on your screen. It shows both the scientific name and the local name of the plant for your area.
In order to precisely identify a plant, you have to allow GPS location access without which the identification is not very accurate. When it can access your location, it searches for the genus of the plants in your local region and can come with very precise identifications. But without location information, the results could be not that correct.
You can get the PlantNet Plant Identifier app from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.plantnet.