Hawaiʻi invasive plant management · a working prototype
Know when an invasive plant sets seed — and what its seed looks like.
Treat a weed before it fruits and the seed crop goes with it. Treat it after, and the work can spread it. Catch a seed at a port and the incursion stops there — if you can name it.
Both answers already exist, in museum drawers and in a century of photographs. This site reads them out, and shows the reading happening rather than describing it.
Hawaiian specimens whose collector recorded them in fruit
- 01
Phenology
When does this plant set seed?
Month-by-month timing for invasive species, by island, built from field observations and museum specimens — with the number of records behind every answer shown plainly.
16 species with a Hawaiian calendar · 1,093 field records
Open phenology → - 02
Herbaria
What can a machine read off a specimen?
A century of pressed Hawaiian plants, and the software that reads them — running on this site, on real specimens, while you watch. Including a model you can train yourself in half a second.
8,590 Hawaiian specimens · 56 museums
Open herbaria → - 03
Library
What is this seed?
Describe an unknown seed and the candidates narrow. Plus the reference standard the identification tool compares against — measured, imaged, and shared with the native seed collection.
38 species in the key · imaging standard set
Open library →
Nothing here is a mock-up
Every specimen was pulled from a museum that publishes its collection openly. Every field record was made by a named person and carries their licence. Every number below counts something real.
- 8,590
- Hawaiian specimens
- 1,093
- field observations
- 1,918
- species
- 8
- islands
- 56
- museums
- 1770–2026
- years covered
The gap this closes
Records say “fruiting.” None say whether the seed was ripe.
Every museum field and every observation vocabulary uses the same coarse word. We checked. Not one distinguishes green, unripe fruit from fruit already dropping viable seed.
That is the distinction control work turns on. It cannot be looked up, because nobody wrote it down — but it is plainly visible in the photograph. Which is why this project trains a model to see it, and pays people who know plants to teach it.
What a crew leader does differently
- FloweringNo seed yet. Treatment now costs nothing in spread.
- Green fruitThe window. Remove the plants and the seed crop goes with them.
- Ripe fruitToo late to prevent. Mowing or hauling now moves live seed to new ground.
Only the first can be answered from existing records. The other two are what this project adds.
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fruitingField photographs recorded in fruit · Darcy Kehler, Sean Ford, Ocean Fleskes, Dulcey Lima and others, licensed under Creative Commons