This document discusses recent trends in automated plant species identification. It begins by outlining the main steps in automated plant identification systems: image acquisition, pre-processing, feature extraction, classification, and identification. Artificial neural networks are commonly used for classification and can learn from examples to generalize to new cases. Convolutional neural networks, a type of deep learning, have also shown promise by automatically learning discriminative features from images. Leaves are most commonly used for identification due to their abundance and planar structure, but combining features from multiple plant organs may improve accuracy. Shape, veins, color, and texture are important leaf features while flower shape and color are also potentially discriminative.