Finding Species has collaborated with the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Department of Botany to document woody plants of the Washington, DC Metro Area and the trees and shrubs of New York City’s Central Park to protect native plant species, habitats, and the wildlife that depend on them. The organization is also collaborating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Chesapeake Bay Field Office for this project. The project is intended to develop on-line resources for the public to identify species and guide them to the types of species they would like to use in conservation landscaping.
Native Plants
Native Plants Project including LeafSnap Collaboration
Finding Species sees a critical need for more information and excitement about native plants. We are losing native plant populations to fragmentation, habitat loss, and invasive species. Native plants are important for many reasons: they maintain native pollinator populations; they support migratory birds; they provide food and shelter to wildlife; they maintain the genetics for future domesticated crops that are already adapted to local climates and water supplies.
Conservationists, field biologists, land managers, and land landowners do not have enough tools to identify the plants that they seek to protect and study. They need to be able to identify species reliably, but often cannot. Gardeners encounter inadequate photographs and overly technical texts even if they would like to pursue native gardens. They need quality photographs to conceptualize how different species will look, and simple supplemental texts, in order to fill their rain gardens, roofgardens, or backyard habitats with a biodiverse landscape.
Finding Species is meeting those needs. We are taking stunningly beautiful and standardized photographs of native plants and bringing native plants to diverse audiences with botanical information and cutting edge technology. Finding Species photographers and botanists are working in an inter-disciplinary team of researchers from major institutions: Smithsonian Institution botanists, Columbia University computer scientists and visual information experts, and University of Maryland advanced computing scientists.
These institutions have developed an app ( seewww.leafsnap.com) that can be used to identify plants. Users can snap a photograph of the leaf of a plant they wish to identify using their smartphone, and upload it using the app. The best matches for those species are returned to the user. Species matches can be browsed, and profiles of each species feature numerous high resolution photographs by Finding Species—of leaves, flowers, fruit, and bark. Finding Species has been finding, photographing, and writing profiles of plants for LeafSnap since 2007. There are several thousand high resolution photographs by Finding Species in the LeafSnap app. More species profiles and photographs will be added in coming field seasons. The photographs we have taken and the species identifications are backed by pressed voucher specimens, and more recently by DNA tissue samples as well, to be housed at the U.S. National Herbarium in the Smithsonian Institution.
Funders and Acknowledgments for our Native Plant Project & LeafSnap Collaboration
The Smithsonian Institution and Columbia University fund and oversee Finding Species’ work for LeafSnap. Finding Species received an angel matching grant from Carrie Steedman and the Liddell family to start the organization’s LeafSnap work, and a seed grant from the Chesapeake Bay Field Office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to start its Native Plant Project.
Finding Species greatly appreciates all the institutions and public and private landowners that have permitted us to photograph and collect from their trees, shrubs, vines and herbs. These institutions are: Adkins Arboretum; The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University; Brookside Gardens; Central Park Conservancy; The City of Takoma Park; The City of New York; Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Park: National Park Service; George Washington National Forest: U.S. Forest Service; Houston Arboretum and Nature Center; Mercer Arboretum & Botanic Gardens; Montgomery County Department of Parks; Rock Creek Park: National Park Service; San Antonio Botanical Gardens; The Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College; The State Arboretum of Virginia (Orland E. White Arboretum) and Blandy Experimental Farm; Stephen F. Austin Mast Arboretum at Stephen F. Austin University; Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute; U.S. National Arboretum.
There are many individuals affiliated with these and other institutions who have greatly facilitated and encouraged the work of Finding Species for LeafSnap, including: Ellie Altman, Edward Sibley Barnard, Jane and George Bass, Scott Bell, Carole Bergmann, Todd Bolton, Norman Bourg, Ph.D., Andrew Bunting, Neil Calvanese, David Carr, Charlie Davis, Michael S. Dosmann, Ph.D., Geoffrey Fenner, Doug Gill, Ph.D., Sarah Hill, Jack Kyte, Rhoda Maurer, Richard Lieberman, Shawn McCracken, Phil Normandy, Janice Owens, Kathryn Reshetiloff, Kathryn Richardson, T'ai Roulston, and Kevin Tunison.
Finding Species extends a warm thank you to these institutions and individuals.