BIO04_PlantSweeper

Guten Tag! We are the team PlantSweeper.

We are concerned with the loss of biodiversity which takes place at an alarming rate due to human activity. The current pace of exctinction is up to 1000 times higher than natural background rates. Invasive alien species are one of the top reasons for declining nature.

Hence we have come up with an application called PlantSweeper that assists users in identifying plants – both invasive alien species as well as other alien and native plant species. This way people can easily identify plants in a step-by-step manner while going through a number of questions with options. Our solution differentiates from other apps alike as instead of image recognition it takes the user on a game-like journey, therefore making it both fun and educative.

The target audience for the app in both experts as well as common users as it connects casual users with botany expert community in the aim of both helping environmental agencies to track invasive plants and through education and gamification process educating app users on diverse world of plants.

Even if we don't have a plant in database, then we propose user to submit its photo. The photo proceeds to curation with the description that is already filled. Thats how we solve a problem of the time/money cost of supervision of the plant monitoring and database.

The decision tree is built on the questions that reflect a common sense rather than pure scientific description. This enable us to gamify the identification. An application claims that it will guess the plant. User plays the game. Experts receive an important information directly from the filed.

With this mobile application we do our’s bit in halting the loss of biodiversity so that we can have food, clean water, medicine and safe environment – the essential ecosystem services that rely on the diverse species and their habitats.