October Plant.id upgrade

We didn't really plan on blogging about yet another Plant.id model upgrade. But we can't help ourselves and have to share the great results. In addition to increasing the number of classes from 33,325 to 35,756, we are excited that performance has improved significantly in Europe and North America.

Performance on a weighted validation set increases steadily over the three versions of the Plant.id API model: 110 is the old one, 3.0.0 is the model from July 2023, 3.1.0 is the latest model from October 2023. The percentage of correct identifications in the latest model increased in all TOP 1, TOP 3 and TOP 10, indicating a significant improvement in accuracy.

The following analysis was performed on a GBIF sample of 50,000 observations (dated to the first half of 2023). When the dataset was broken down by region, the largest increases were recorded in the European (5.3% in the TOP 1) and North American (2.0% in the TOP 1) datasets, compared to the previous July model. This analysis GBIF is a highly trusted and reliable international platform of open-access plant data. Detailed results with individual observations are available in this spreadsheet.

Along with this upgrade, we have deployed a new optional model for cultivar identification.