Application of digital field photographs as documents for tropical plant inventory

We tested the credibility and significance of digital field photographs as supplements or substitutes for conventional herbarium specimens with particular relevance to exploration of the tropics.

We made 113 collections in triplicate at a species-rich mountain in the Philippines while we took 1238 digital photographs of the same plants. We then identified the plants from the photographs alone, categorized the confidence of the identification and the reason for failure to identify, and compared the results to identifications based on the dried specimens.

We identified 72.6% of the photographic sets with high confidence and 27.4% with low confidence or only to genus. In no case was a confident identification altered by subsequent examination of the dried specimen. The failure to identify photographic sets to species was due to the lack of a key feature in 67.8% of the cases and due to a poorly understood taxonomy in 32.2%.

We conclude that digital photographs cannot replace traditional herbarium specimens as the primary elements that document tropical plant diversity. However, photographs represent a new and important artifact that aids an expedient survey of tropical plant diversity while encouraging broad public participation.