PI@ntNet is much more than an identification tool.
Dear Pl@ntNet users,
Pl@ntNet thanks you for your unwavering support and help over the years. Now is the time to look back on the past year and our latest advances, and to invite you to support us through our 2026 donation campaign.
Our work can continue largely thanks to your generosity in 2025.
Looking back on 2026
The Pl@ntNet consortium grew this year with the arrival of new members, including the Université de Montréal, strengthening our international scientific collaborations. Thanks to these partnerships, we can now identify nearly 85,000 plant species, with notable progress in coverage of Central African and Neotropical flora.
In addition, since last February, Pl@ntNet has offered disease and pest identification. This feature builds on work carried out as part of the French research project Pl@ntAgroEco. In particular, we are working to improve identification performance for cultivated plants, and have so far catalogued more than 2,000 diseases across nearly a hundred plant species.
You can try this feature now: simply visit the website or open the mobile app and select the “Diseases and pests” flora.
Where do your donations go?
- Towards keeping our team stable, with two people paid full-time to maintain and develop the Pl@ntNet platform,
- towards maintaining our servers and the infrastructure that supports Pl@ntNet, which accounts for around a quarter of our expenses,
- and finally, towards expanding Pl@ntNet to cover more species: adding 8,000 new species in 2026 requires ongoing work to maintain the same identification performance for species already covered.
Improvements to our existing services
We would like to warmly thank our volunteer validators. They work behind the scenes to flag and correct identification errors in observations, helping to make Pl@ntNet even more reliable. Their work is what enables us to identify your photos so successfully today. Their feedback has also led to the introduction of several features, such as warning messages for certain species and identification at the genus and family levels.
To make reviewing observations and exploring data easier, a new way to browse observations is now available, with around ten filters (taxonomic, geographical, etc.) to help you find the observations you are looking for more quickly.
Maintaining a service like Pl@ntNet does not just mean adding new features; it also, and above all, means taking care of what is already there. This year, the significant impact of AI indexing bots on our traffic prompted us to prioritize tasks that are less visible to users but essential to addressing this new challenge and keeping the platform reliably available.
GeoPl@ntNet, our service for mapping plant distribution and diversity on a large scale, which we told you about last year, has also made great strides! Alongside a new, more user-friendly interface, its inner workings have been extensively redesigned to improve performance. In addition, a new model for generating maps has been trained on tens of millions of plant occurrence records. After an initial phase of development focused on Europe, GeoPl@ntNet is now beginning to expand to the rest of the world, with initial work carried out in Costa Rica.
Finally, our work on identifying different species within a single image through the Pl@ntNet Plots feature has also progressed well, with the launch of a plot analysis service on the Web version of Pl@ntNet.
What’s next for 2027?
We are already working to make new information on species characteristics available (plant height, leaf type, flower colors, etc.), drawing in particular on work carried out by research teams over nearly 20 years. This information will also help us guide you more effectively during identification by narrowing down the list of results.
On the research side, our analysis of images of tropical canopies continues with many partners around the world. In time, this work will enable us to provide identification tools for the thousands of photos collected in these remarkable environments and contribute to their preservation.
Why is your support essential?
Your generosity is essential to keeping the applications in the Pl@ntNet ecosystem free, independent and ad-free, and ensuring they remain a resource accessible to everyone, everywhere in the world. We are therefore launching our donation campaign on our website and mobile app. Every donation counts, no matter the amount. Your donations enable us to continue the work at the heart of our mission: to better understand plant biodiversity and share that knowledge as widely as possible. We firmly believe that understanding the living world is essential to protecting it.
To donate now, simply click the button below:
Once again this year, the Pl@ntNet team warmly thanks you for your continued support. Your contributions truly make a difference and help us every day in our mission to share knowledge of plant biodiversity and preserve it. So, once again, thank you for your generosity, and we wish you wonderful botanical discoveries as 2026 draws to a close.
With all our gratitude,
The Pl@ntNet team
🇫🇷 Made in Montpellier
