Shades of Star Trek’s Tricorder. A team of reseachers financed by the National Science Foundation has produced a prototype iPhone app that identifies tree species. It matches a picture of a leaf with its database and narrows it down to 5 to 10 possibilities. So far the application has been tested in three areas but the data is limited to the northeastern U.S. Creator Sean White wants to develop applications for Google, Nokia and Microsoft platforms as well, although it will be some time before it is available to consumers.