Missouri Botanical Garden Open Conference Systems, TDWG 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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Anymals + plants – Biodiversity in your pocket
Falko Glöckler, Alexander Krupa, Daniel Zitterbart, M. Uher, Tom Uher

Building: Main Building 1st Floor
Room: Salone degli Oceani
Last modified: 2013-10-06

Abstract


In recent times, the knowledge of citizens about species has decreased more and more. Reversing this loss of knowledge is central to raising the awareness of the importance of biodiversity and its benefits to humans through ecosystem services. As modern mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) are broadly used by people, the project anymals.org (http://www.anymals.org) uses this technology to create an interface between users and existing biodiversity information.

With the help of the mobile software anymals+plants users can retrieve information about biodiversity in their surroundings and furthermore they can record own observations (species name, coordinates and photos). The data provided to the users come from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Catalogue of Life, and Wikipedia. Newly recorded data will be sent to GBIF, which is for reasons of data quality, only possible for registered users. Additionally, users can control observations made within the community by raising doubts and discussing implausible records. The general aim of the mobile app is not to create a new biodiversity database, but to combine multiple facilities and services. Therefore, it provides a generic web-interface to export the data to your own projects. This interface is adopted by Scratchpads (www.scratchpads.eu) and allows for integrating data collected with the mobile app into a Scratchpads project website.

Finally, we want to inspire both citizens and scientists and to discover biodiversity with the help of modern technology.