The BotanizeR Shiny application allows to test and improve your
botanical knowledge for a defined set of species based on a defined
set of images and ecological and morphological descriptions.
In the Species tab, you can retrieve all deposited information for
each species.
In the Quiz tab you can practice your species identification skills.
The app will show you random species and you are asked to provide the
species name (case insensitive). You may browse through a selection
of pictures and enable additional hints based on species
morphological and ecological descriptions. The app gives feedback on
whether your attempt was correct or not and if not, how different the
actual name is and whether the genus was correct or not. The quiz
keeps track of the species shown and answered correctly and uses this
information to show species that ave been answered correctly less
frequently and species which have not been answered correctly more
frequently (if enabled). You can download the species list after
practicing and upload it again to make use of the saved numbers of
successes and failures when practicing again.
In the Setup tab you can choose which species to practice, either by
choosing from a predefined set of species lists or by uploading a
customized species list. You can subset the species list by those
species found in
GBIF for a defined radius around a desired location. You can also define which hints and images to make
available in the Species overview and Quiz tabs based on all the
resources available in this instance of BotanizeR and hints you added
to the species list.
This particular instance of the BotanizeR Shiny app exemplifies a few
particular use cases. Here, you can practice species from the Floras
of Germany, Britain and Ireland based on information retrieved live
from the websites of
FloraWeb
and the
UK & Ireland Plant Atlas.
You can choose which of the Floras to practice species from, which
species subset to use and which information from each of the websites
to show.
In addition to the complete floras (UK_Ireland & Germany), you can
choose to practice species from a list of about 700 plants known from Sussex,
UK (UK_Ireland_Sussex), a list of 174 species common in forests and
grasslands around Göttingen, Germany (Germany_BioDiv), a list of 128
woody species from Germany with additional images available in winter state
(Germany_winter), and a list of 214 species of forest indicator species from
Germany (Germany_summer).
In the settings tab, you can enable and disable images and hints from the
UK & Ireland Plant Atlas or
FloraWeb as well as
images from a local folder on the server including images in winter state
as an example of images provided by the host of the app. You can also enable
or disable the English and French common names as examples of hints
provided directly via the species list table by the host of the app or by the
user.
BotanizeR is highly flexible and easy to set up, allowing lecturers
to define themselves the species list, picture base and species
characteristics to show to their students. Technically, BotanizeR is
an R-package which can be installed from
GitHub. Tutorials on how to setup BotanizeR are vailable
here.
The quiz can be played within R or better RStudio or alternatively it
can be made available via the package’s Shiny app. The Shiny
app can be launched locally after installing the package or on a
Shiny server to make it accessible to a broader audience. When using
it locally students could be provided with a species list with
descriptions and an image folder for download which can then be
loaded from within the Shiny app and used for practicing. When
launching it on a Shiny server, BotanizeR can be accessed online via
an URL and species lists, descriptions and pictures can be made
available right away within the app like exemplified here.
This instance of BotanizeR retrieves images and information from
FloraWeb and the
UK & Ireland Plant Atlas.
Please visit these websites for more information about sources and
image authors.
In addition, images of plants around Göttingen, Germany and woody plants in
winter state have been
provided by F. Brambach, C. Dönges, H. Kreft, J. Kuper and
H. Reichelt from
Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography
which are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International License (
CC BY-SA 4.0
).
The BotanizeR R-package and Shiny app have been developed at Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography by Patrick Weigelt & Pierre Denelle.
Weigelt, P., Denelle, P., Brambach, F. & Kreft, H. (2021) A flexible R package with Shiny app to practice plant identification for online teaching and beyond. PLANTS, PEOPLE, PLANET, https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10226.
Coded under License GPLv3