Pl@ntNet is best known for its identification app. But the platform rests on three connected pillars: an AI identification model, a community of several million users producing observations worldwide, and a biodiversity dataset that has quietly become a major scientific resource. What are those data actually used for?
From app to open data
Since 2020, initially within the European Cos4Cloud project, Pl@ntNet has regularly contributed its most reliable observations to GBIF: both community-validated observations and automated identifications with very high confidence scores. Because they are open and standardised, those records have been reused in more than 1,500 international scientific publications — in ecology, conservation biology, biogeography, environmental modelling and artificial intelligence. You can browse them in the literature section of this portal.
Filling the gaps on global trait maps
A paper published in Nature Communications in January 2026 illustrates the point. Lusk, Wolf, Svidzinska and colleagues combined citizen-science observations — including Pl@ntNet records obtained through GBIF — with the reference databases TRY (measured plant functional traits such as leaf size, wood density and seed mass) and sPlot (standardised vegetation surveys) to produce high-resolution global maps of plant functional traits.
The authors show that citizen-science data fill major geographical gaps in regions poorly covered by traditional inventories, in particular tropical, mountainous and historically under-sampled areas, and that platforms like Pl@ntNet now deliver research-ready data that can be plugged directly into large-scale analyses. Trait maps of this kind are essential to understand how ecosystems function and respond to climate change.
Lusk, D., Wolf, S., Svidzinska, D. et al. Crowdsourced biodiversity monitoring fills gaps in global plant trait mapping. Nat Commun 17, 1203 (2026). doi:10.1038/s41467-026-68996-y
Beyond ecology
The same convergence of citizen science, botanical expertise and AI feeds work on invasive species, climate-change dynamics and large-scale automated mapping. All of it relies on two things: open biodiversity data infrastructure such as GBIF, and the contributors who keep the observations coming.
Read the full article on plantnet.org, and learn how the records on this portal are selected on the about page.