Flora incognita

Flora incognita is a cannabis strain identification tool. A free, ad-free plant identification app from a German research project. It recognizes over 30,000 species and lets users save observations that feed citizen science. Works offline on Android and iOS.

Flora Incognita is a mobile application that uses image recognition to identify plants. It covers more than 30,000 species, and once a photo is taken the app returns a species suggestion along with reference material on characteristics, protection status and distribution. The tool is built by a research collaboration between TU Ilmenau and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, and it doubles as a citizen science platform: saved observations feed into the Flora Incognita++ project, where they are used for ecological research. In practice the app is aimed at a wide audience. Hobby botanists, students, teachers and conservation volunteers can use it in the field without a network connection, which makes it suitable for remote meadows, forest transects and school excursions. The identification flow is camera-first: point the phone at a leaf, flower or whole plant, capture an image, and the model returns a ranked list of candidates. From there users can store the record, review the species profile and, if they choose, contribute the sighting to the research dataset. The project reports an identification accuracy of 98.8 percent in a published study, which places it among the stronger free plant ID tools. The app is free of charge and free of advertising, and it is distributed for Android (including Huawei AppGallery) and iOS. There is no web dashboard described on the homepage, so the phone is the primary working surface. Compared with general-purpose vision models, Flora Incognita is narrower but more accountable: its training data, accuracy claims and research outputs are documented, and its species coverage is deeper than most consumer plant apps. The trade-off is scope. It identifies plants, not fungi, insects or landscapes, and the research framing means the product roadmap follows scientific priorities as much as consumer convenience.