Flora Incognita – more than just a plant identification app

Post provided by Michael Rzanny & Jana Wäldchen

Species identification is an essential tool for recording biodiversity, especially in an era of habitat loss and climate change. Developing skills to correctly identify plants to a species or even a genus level can take many years of training, but a new app called Flora Incognita aims to empower citizens with botanical expertise while also collecting data for scientific analysis.

In this blog post, Michael Rzanny and Jana Wäldchen reveal the inspiration behind this new app and discuss highlights from their new paper “The Flora Incognita app – interactive plant species identification” recently published in Methods in Ecology & Evolution

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Issue 7.8

Issue 7.8 is now online!

The August issue of Methods is now online!

This month’s issue contains two Applications articles and two Open Access articles, all of which are freely available.

Plant-O-Matic: A free iOS application that combines the species distribution models with the location services built into a mobile device to provide users with a list of all plant species expected to occur in the 100 × 100 km geographic grid cell corresponding to the user’s location.

RClone: An R package built upon genclone software which includes functions to handle clonal data sets, allowing:

  • Checking for data set reliability to discriminate multilocus genotypes (MLGs)
  • Ascertainment of MLG and semi-automatic determination of clonal lineages (MLL)
  • Genotypic richness and evenness indices calculation based on MLGs or MLLs
  • Describing several spatial components of clonality

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