[morphle]

I've downloaded almost 2 million photo's from several bird, insect and plant databases this weekend and (partially) compared them with the Plantnet and iNaturalist datasets. And I looked at the dozens of other databases with mosses, lichen, bacteria, etc. Still, no where near the >8,7 million species of the world are in those databases. The most complete list would be the plants of Europe (only a few thousand out of 400K species), most other regions and kingdoms are only partially identified. As we can see from dozens of papers, new species have been found through the iNaturalist collecting. Making better software and more data would certainly boost the rate of new species discovery. And that is vital, as we are in the middle of the 6th mass exinction event of the last 570 million years. Species go extinct before we even have photographed or identified!

I also have my dad's Flora research photo's from 30 year field trips and my own, of which 3000 plants where identified with Flora Europeae dychotomic key (a day's work per flower).