To date, the world of mobile phone apps has largely left me cold. Yes, I can see how you can easily lose an hour of your life – or more – to Angry Birds. But the most interesting and potentially useful developments I have seen so far are apps such as Shazam and RedLaser. The power to identify and recognise non-text based things such as images and music points to just how potent and useful mobile phones are becoming.

It now appears that we could be about to reach a significant new landmark. An app has just been launched that can identify a species of tree from a photograph of its leaf. Apps exist already that help you identify flora and fauna – the Forestry Commission recently launched an app called ForestXplorer for identifying trees – but they have traditionally relied on the user deducing the species from a list of possible characteristics.

Leafsnap promises something different: a joint effort by Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution in the US, it uses the same technology as face-recognition software to identity the species itself:

This free mobile app helps identify tree species from photographs of their leaves and contains beautiful high-resolution images of their flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to cover the trees of the entire continental United States.

Leafsnap turns users into citizen scientists, automatically sharing images, species identifications, and geo-coded stamps of species locations with a community of scientists who will use the stream of data to map and monitor the ebb and flow of flora nationwide.

The Leafsnap family of electronic field guides aims to leverage digital applications and mobile devices to build an ever-greater awareness of and appreciation for biodiversity.

Personally, I think this is a tremendously exciting development. Just think what species recognition software could be next: edible fungi; rock-pool inhabitants; butterflies; wild flowers; the list is endless. Couple this with the app's "geo-coding" potential and it could help to generate some very powerful data. (Please do share below any "nature-spotting" apps you have found particularly useful.)

There is a slight lament to note, though. As a child, I used to enjoy flicking through wildlife pocket guides trying to identify species when out on long walks, or on the beach. I wonder what impact this software will have on children today when they know they can identify something within a matter of a few seconds without any real effort or engagement? Will that help to educate and inspire them? Or, conversely, will it tune them into things they might have otherwise simply ignored?