Three of three · seed identification
What is this seed?
An unknown seed turns up — in a shipment, on a boot, in a soil sample. Describe what you can see and the list narrows. No account, no upload, works on a phone with a hand lens.
Working now · no model required
The identification key
Thirty-eight invasive and high-risk species are loaded. Skip any question you cannot answer — unanswered questions are ignored rather than held against a candidate, because a key that punishes you for not owning a microscope is no use at a loading dock.
What can you see?
How big is it?
Longest dimension. Against a ruler or a coin edge is fine — this is the fastest way to cut the list down.
What shape is it?
Turn it over. Many seeds are flattened on one face where they pressed against a neighbour.
Does it carry anything?
Wings, hairs, hooks and fleshy attachments are how a seed travels, and they are the most diagnostic thing about it.
What is the surface like?
Tilt it to the light. Under a hand lens the difference between smooth and pitted is obvious.
Was it inside anything?
If you have the fruit as well as the seed, this is decisive. Skip it if you only have loose seed.
How do you think it arrived?
Optional, and a guess is fine. Where you found it often narrows things as much as the seed does.
Skip anything you cannot see. Unanswered questions are ignored rather than held against a species.
All 38 species
answer anything on the left to narrow this
What this key can and cannot do
It narrows an unknown seed against thirty-eight species that matter in Hawaiʻi, using characters anyone can see with a hand lens. That is what keys have always done, and it needs no model.
It also declines to answer. If no candidate clears the reliability threshold, or two are too close to separate, it returns unresolved and shows a shortlist instead of a name. A wrong name entered into a reporting system is worse than no name — it closes a case that should have stayed open.
What it cannot do yet is confirm the answer. Confirmation needs calibrated photographs of known seed to compare against, and measurements taken from that material rather than from a book. Those are the seed reference library — and once they exist, the same interface accepts a photograph instead of a description.
How the two halves fit together →What the funding builds
The reference library
The key narrows. Confirming an answer needs calibrated photographs of known seed to compare against, and measurements taken from that material rather than from a book. Those records already exist for Hawaiian native species — this is one of them.
Close-up
One seed, filling the frame, focus-stacked. This is where surface texture, hilum position and sculpturing are legible — the characters that separate close relatives.
Pair
Two seeds, usually showing different faces. Many seeds are flattened on one side where they pressed against a neighbour, and a single view hides that.
Cluster
Several seeds together at lower magnification. Shows the range of size and colour within one collection, which a single specimen never does.
Images © Lyon Arboretum Rare Plant Program Seeds Lab, served from SeedsOfHawaii.org. Nothing is copied here.
Dodonaea viscosa
Sapindaceae · aʻaliʻi, aʻaliʻi kū makani · Indigenous
- 2.01–2.13 mm
- length
- 1.92–2.05 mm
- width
- 2.08–4.47 mg
- mass
- Round, Ovate or obovate
- 2D shape
- Subglobose / ellipsoid
- 3D shape
- Glabrous
- texture
Two millimetres across, weighing two to four milligrams. Those numbers are why measurement matters: a dozen species on the priority list are round, brown and roughly this size, and mass or a tenth of a millimetre separates them when shape cannot.
The imaging standard
At least three focus-stacked orientations per species, plus ordinary phone-camera images representing what a user will actually photograph. The two are not interchangeable: stacked images are the reference a model learns from, and phone images are what it will be asked about at a dock in poor light.
Why focus stacking
A seed two millimetres across, photographed close enough to show its surface, has a depth of field thinner than the seed itself. One exposure is sharp across a band and blurred everywhere else. Stacking combines many exposures at different focal depths into a single sharp image — the difference between a photograph of a seed and a usable reference.
Native and non-native, side by side
Records like the one above already exist for Hawaiian natives. The funded work adds 100 priority invasive and high-risk species to the same standard, in the same vocabulary — so an unknown seed is checked against both sets at once, and an inspector can tell a native from an incursion rather than only ruling one in.
It matters that the schema matches. A reference record built to a different standard has to be reconciled later; one built to this standard is directly comparable on the day it is made. The key above asks its questions in exactly these words for the same reason.