Species recognition in herbaria and standing trees using an accessible portable spectrometer

Abstract

Species identification in hyperdiverse regions such as the Amazon forest, is time-consuming and often prone to errors. In light of the current rapid biodiversity loss, developing fast and low-cost methods to support species identification in both field and herbarium samples is fundamental to improve the quality of tropical forest inventories. We tested two spectrometers - the high-performance portable ASD FieldSpec® 4 (350–2500 nm; 6–10 kg) and the handheld ISC NIR-S-G1 (900–1700 nm; 150 g), to assess their ability to discriminate tree species from bark and leaf samples. Both instruments achieved accuracy higher than 90% using herbarium leaf samples and 81 to 90% with bark spectra. Although the ISC NIR-S-G1 performance was slightly worse than the ASD, increasing the number of scans per sample improved its accuracy. Demonstrating the effectiveness of this compact, low-cost device for accurate recognition of plant species highlights new opportunities to expand spectral applications for biodiversity monitoring, species identification to forest management and forest conservation specially to countries of the Global South.

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