The Nature LibraryEN·ES

The Identification Desk

Bring a photograph of a plant, animal or fungus. The desk runs a tree-of-life vision model in your own browser and tells you what it might be, and what else it could be.

Lay your specimen here

Drop a photograph, or tap to take one. Fill the frame with one leaf, flower, cap or animal.

How the desk works

  1. iThe desk uses BioCLIP, a vision model trained on more than ten million images across the tree of life, and runs it entirely in your browser. Your photograph never leaves your device.
  2. iiIt compares the photo against the 10,000 most-recorded species on iNaturalist, then searches the 10,000 most-recorded within whichever groups it looks like (birds, plants, insects, fungi, fish…), each described by its full scientific lineage.
  3. iiiShare your location and it favours species naturalists have actually recorded near you, which corrects most confusions between look-alikes from different continents.

Never eat, touch or handle something on the strength of a photo identification.