How the Plant Clinic Works

The Plant Clinic has two entry points, depending on what you’re dealing with.

Both paths end at the same place: a grid of biological active ingredients, organised by how they work, with links to buy nationally registered products from retailers in your country.

Step 1: Identify the insect

Your photo is processed by BioCLIP 2, a vision model trained on 214 million organism photographs. We search against 302,000 arthropod species embeddings to find the closest match, returning the taxonomic family and order.

Multiple photos improve accuracy. On the IP102 pest benchmark — 22,619 images of pests in natural agricultural conditions — single-photo identification achieves 83% accuracy at the order level and 64% at the family level. With 3 photos from different angles, order accuracy rises to 90% and family to 66%.

Step 2: Look up treatments by family

We maintain a pest-family routing matrix — a table of 5,998 rows mapping every combination of insect order, family, and biological active ingredient. This table was built by:

1. Extracting named pest species from 35 EPA-registered product labels (the actual government documents)
2. Resolving each pest common name to its taxonomic family and order via GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility)
3. For families with direct EPA label evidence: marking them as “EPA-registered”
4. For other families in the same order: imputing based on mode of action (e.g. if pyrethrin kills aphids via sodium channel disruption, it likely affects other Hemiptera families the same way)

Step 3: The 2×2 treatment grid

Matched treatments are displayed on two axes: speed (how fast the product works) and specificity (how targeted vs. broad-spectrum it is). This helps you choose: do you need a targeted preventive (like Bt for caterpillars), or an immediate broad-spectrum knockdown (like pyrethrin)?

Step 1: Identify the plant

You search by name or upload a photo. BioCLIP searches against 39,000 garden-ready species (or 140,000 across our full encyclopedia) to identify yours to genus level.

Step 2: Look up known pathogens

We query GloBI (Global Biotic Interactions) — a database of recorded interactions between organisms. For your plant’s genus, we retrieve all documented pathogen genera: the fungi, bacteria, and oomycetes that have been observed infecting plants in that genus.

Each pathogen is linked to a disease common name from the APS Common Names of Plant Diseases — the standard reference maintained by the American Phytopathological Society.

Step 3: Group by visual symptoms

To help you narrow down what’s affecting your plant, we group diseases into nine symptom categories based on what you can see: leaf spots, wilts, rots, rusts, mildews, cankers, root diseases, viral symptoms, and nematode damage. Each category shows reference photographs so you can visually match what’s happening on your plant.

The categorisation was performed by an LLM (large language model) classifying each of 2,778 disease-pathogen pairs against the nine categories — using whether the pathogen is a fungus, bacterium, or virus to help distinguish diseases with similar names.

Step 4: Match to treatments

For each disease, we identify which biological active ingredients are labelled for use against pathogens in that genus. The matching works through two bridges:

1. Bacillus / Trichoderma bridge: We extracted target pathogen genera from EPA product labels for Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, and Trichoderma harzianum products. If your plant’s pathogen genus appears on those labels, the treatment is matched.
2. Neem oil bridge: Clarified and cold-pressed neem oils have broad foliar fungicide claims. We match these to any foliar fungal disease based on the label’s general efficacy claims.

Once a treatment category is matched (e.g. “Bacillus subtilis QST 713”), we look up purchasable products from CABI’s global product database. CABI tracks which biological pest management products are nationally registered in each country — meaning they have passed each government’s safety, and in some jurisdictions, efficacy reviews.

We detect your location and show products registered in your country first. Each product links to Amazon or eBay search results where you can compare prices and availability.

We believe in being upfront about the boundaries of this system. Here’s what you should know: