The invention discloses a tree species identification method based on transfer learning, comprising the following steps: S1, collecting tree images and making tree species image data sets; S2, data enhancement is performed on the original data set image to expand the number of pictures; S3, acquiring more than one pre-training model based on convolution neural network trained on large image dataset, S4, training the pre-training model with tree species image dataset, optimizing one or several full connection layers of the pre-training model in the training process, thereby training a pluralityof classifiers based on convolution neural network; Test the accuracy of each classifier and select the classifier with the highest accuracy. S5 performs tree species identification using the classifier selected in step S4, thereby obtaining an identification result. The invention recognizes tree species based on the transfer learning mode, so that a model with good generalization ability can betrained under the condition of limited sample size of tree species, and the tree species recognition rate under the complex background is greatly improved.