Floralyze
Dutch nature-management platform that uses AI to detect and quantify plant species, including invasive exotics, from drone and aerial imagery. Results arrive as mapped polygons, surface statistics and reports inside a web portal.
What is Floralyze?
Floralyze is a web platform for data-driven nature management, published by the Dutch ecological consultancy Ecogoggle. It applies AI models to drone imagery and aerial photographs in order to recognise plant species, then converts each detection into a GPS position drawn as a polygon on a map. Alongside the map it collects statistics on those detections: the number of observations, the average area per observation and the total area covered by all of them. Everything is presented through a dashboard in an online portal.
The species coverage runs in two directions. On one side are invasive exotics such as Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed, giant hogweed, Japanese rose, floating pennywort and the moss Campylopus introflexus. On the other are valuable target species and habitat indicators such as reindeer lichen, heather, purple moor grass and grey hair-grass. The vendor's own FAQ sets the boundary plainly: the system can map any species that is visually identifiable on the imagery, which also means anything hidden under a canopy or indistinguishable in RGB is out of reach.
The workflow has three stages. You either supply your own drone or aerial imagery, or have the publisher's pilots fly the site for you; Floralyze processes the material; the images and analyses then appear directly in the portal. Self-supplied imagery must reach a ground sampling distance of two centimetres and needs only RGB bands, the same specification the publisher applies to its own flights, with higher resolution or a multispectral sensor available on request.
Inside the portal a viewer displays the high-resolution imagery on any device, field staff can attach notes and photographs from a phone, and imagery can be downloaded for use in a GIS environment. The higher tier adds data overlays and built-in reporting on species distribution. Published references are concrete and checkable: the Dutch state forestry service Staatsbosbeheer, the provinces of Noord-Brabant and Zuid-Holland, and the contractor Boskalis, with documented projects in the Biesbosch wetlands and on the Leenderheide heathland, where the analyses feed habitat quality assessment under the BIJ12 methodology.
What it does
- Detect and identify plant species automatically on drone or aerial imagery
- Quantify each species: number of observations, average area per observation and total area
- Map species distribution as geolocated polygons over the survey area
- Measure the surface percentage of each species against the total area of a site
- Compare surveys taken at different dates to evaluate a management measure
- Produce density and centre-of-gravity visualisations of a species population
- Share online maps with field subcontractors so they avoid spreading an invasive species
When to use Floralyze / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Floralyze is the right fit.
When to use Floralyze
- Nature reserve managers who need to locate invasive exotic plants across a whole site rather than by sampling
- Ecologists and policy officers who must put quantified figures behind a vegetation survey
- Teams assessing habitat quality under the Dutch BIJ12 methodology, which requires surface percentages per species
- Land managers evaluating whether grazing, mowing or hydrological restoration actually changed the vegetation
- Organisations that already own high-resolution drone imagery and want species analysis run on it
When not to use Floralyze
- Buyers who require published contractual documents: no terms, privacy policy, DPA or legal notice exists on either the product or the publisher domain
- Teams that need an API or a developer integration; there is no product API and no developer documentation
- Anyone wanting a mobile application, since none is published on the App Store or Google Play
- Non-Dutch-speaking organisations, as the site and the portal interface exist only in Dutch
- Buyers who need a firm, self-service price, since every figure is an indicative rate confirmed only after a consultation
How to use Floralyze
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Submit the contact form on the 'Aan de slag' page with your name, an email address or phone number, and optionally your organisation
- Wait for the request to be reviewed by the vendor; requesting an analysis is free and carries no obligation
- Discuss your case with the team, who will confirm the exact price for your target species and site area
- Decide whether to supply your own imagery or have the vendor's pilots fly the site
- If supplying your own imagery, check it reaches a ground sampling distance of two centimetres with RGB bands; the vendor will review borderline material for you
- Let Floralyze process the imagery once it has been handed over
- Sign in to the portal with your email address and password
- Review the detections in the viewer as polygons on a map, with per-species surface figures
- Switch between visualisations: raw predictions, density analysis, centre-of-gravity analysis and total surface
- Add field observations and photographs from a phone while on site, and export imagery to your GIS environment
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Produces reproducible figures rather than impressions: the publisher states results are always calculated the same way everywhere, without observer bias
- Models are validated against species-level annotations made by ecologists in the field, used as ground truth
- Covers an entire site, where conventional field survey samples it
- Public references are verifiable and institutional: Staatsbosbeheer and two Dutch provinces
- Fits an official national framework, the BIJ12 habitat quality methodology
- Flexible input: bring your own imagery or delegate the flight entirely
- Analyses stay available in the portal indefinitely, and requesting one costs nothing
Cons
- No legal documentation whatsoever: no terms, privacy policy, DPA, cookie policy or legal notice on either domain, an absence established by testing rather than assumed
- Nothing is published about data hosting, subprocessors, personal data retention or whether customer material trains the models
- No firm pricing: the published figures are indicative rates that may vary, and the top tier carries no price at all
- No self-service route and no product trial; every engagement starts with a form and a conversation
- Dutch only, with no English version of the site or the portal
- No product API and no developer documentation; a direct GIS coupling is mentioned but no endpoint is published
- Detection is limited to visually identifiable species and requires imagery of at least two centimetres GSD
Pricing & Plans
No permanent free plan is described, and no product trial is offered; what is free is the analysis request and the initial consultation. Pricing is charged by area rather than by subscription or seat. The vendor publishes an indicative rate of EUR 10 per species analysis per hectare, to which the All-in formula adds an imagery cost of EUR 15 per hectare. The vendor states explicitly that both figures may vary with the target species, the size of the area and any flight restrictions, and that the exact price is given after a free, no-obligation request. The Enterprise formula carries no published price. No indication is given as to whether the amounts include or exclude VAT.
- access to the Floralyze portal
- detailed species analyses in the viewer
- and field notes and photographs from a phone. Indicative rate of EUR 10 per species analysis per hectare.
- everything in the previous tier
- plus the high-resolution viewer on any device and imagery download for GIS use. Indicative rate of EUR 10 per species analysis per hectare plus EUR 15 per hectare of imagery.
- everything in the previous tiers
- plus smart data overlays and built-in distribution reporting. Price to be determined.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Floralyze handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere. Neither floralyze.nl nor the publisher's site ecogoggle.nl publishes a privacy policy, terms and conditions, cookie policy or legal notice, and the absence was verified rather than assumed: ten legal paths return a 404 response byte-identical to a deliberately invented path, the sitemap lists twenty URLs and none of them is a legal page, and the publisher's domain behaves the same way. As a result, the record states nothing about lawful basis, data subject rights, retention of personal data, international transfers, subprocessors or a data protection officer, because the vendor states nothing about them either. This is a factual finding about the vendor's published documentation, not a gap in the review, and it leaves every compliance-related field of this record empty.
Data retention & training
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Floralyze.
- With no privacy policy or terms on either domain, you cannot know from the vendor's own pages who owns the uploaded imagery and the resulting analyses, nor what may be done with them; settle this contractually before sending any material
- Nothing is published about whether customer imagery is used to train the models, and no opt-out is described, on a product whose accuracy explicitly improves with annotated ground truth
- Detections are model predictions, not observations; treating a polygon as a confirmed record without field verification can send management measures to the wrong place, and the vendor's own approach rests on validating models against fieldwork
- Complete area coverage can create false confidence: the system maps only what is visually identifiable in RGB imagery at two centimetres, so anything under a canopy or spectrally ambiguous is silently absent from the map rather than flagged as unknown
- Prices are indicative and vary with species and area, and the top tier has no price at all, so budgets built on the published EUR 10 and EUR 15 per hectare figures can move; it is also unstated whether they include VAT
- The legal entity dates from November 2018 while the product domain was registered in May 2023 and launched that June, and the company was renamed in September 2019: the publisher's track record is older than this specific product
- The homepage claim of being the number one monitoring platform is presented with no source or comparison, and the publisher's stated goal of covering a quarter of Dutch Natura 2000 areas by 2025 is left without any follow-up on whether it was met
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low on the software side, moderate on the imagery side. There is nothing to install: the portal runs in a browser and access is by email address and password. The technical requirement concerns the pictures rather than the tool. Imagery you supply must reach a ground sampling distance of two centimetres with RGB bands, and the vendor will review existing material free of charge to confirm it qualifies. That constraint disappears entirely if you choose the formula where its own pilots fly the site. No integration has to be configured; imagery can be exported to a GIS environment. Onboarding runs through a conversation with the vendor rather than self-service.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind Floralyze
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What does Floralyze actually detect?
How much does it cost?
What imagery specification is required?
How long are analyses kept in the portal?
Is there an API?
Is there a mobile app?
Does the site publish terms or a privacy policy?
Who is behind Floralyze?
Is the tool available in English?
Can I try it before committing?
Should you pick Floralyze?
Floralyze is a narrow tool that knows its market well. Turning drone imagery into counted, measured and mapped plant species answers a real problem in Dutch nature management, where habitat quality has to be expressed as surface percentages under the BIJ12 methodology and where invasive species must be located before they can be tackled. The references are institutional and checkable, the mechanics are described clearly enough to be judged, and the per-hectare pricing is unusually transparent about being indicative rather than pretending to be firm.
The weakness is not in the product but in what surrounds it. There is no published contractual documentation at all: no terms, no privacy policy, no data processing agreement, on the product site or on the publisher's. That absence was verified rather than assumed, and it means an organisation cannot learn from the vendor's own pages where imagery and analyses are hosted, how long personal data is kept, who the subprocessors are, or whether customer material feeds model training. For public bodies and their contractors, which is exactly this tool's clientele, those are questions a procurement process will ask on day one.
The commercial route reinforces the same impression of a small, consultative operation: no self-service access, no trial, one general contact address on the publisher's domain, and no linked social presence. Buyers should expect a conversation rather than a sign-up, and should plan to obtain the contractual and hosting answers directly from the vendor, in writing, since the website supplies none of them. Within Dutch-speaking nature and land management, and with those questions settled, the offer is coherent and its evidence base is solid.
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