Species list





















Species list


Select a species list



Upload a species list

Subset by local species



Download the species list

Download your progress

Custom material


Choose here which of the species characteristics and image links available in the species list (e.g. columns ownhint_Growth_form and imagelink_2) and images from which image folders on the shiny server to show in the species overview and quiz.



Image folders

Quiz Controls


Shall all species in the quiz be shown with equal probabilities (uniform) or based on previous successes and failures (dynamic)?


Shall complete taxon names be required as answers in the quiz or shall binomial names of genus and epithet be sufficient, ignoring hybrid markers and infraspecific information?


Online resources


BotanizeR offers links to images, distribution maps and chorological and functional characteristics from FloraWeb and the UK & Ireland Plant Atlas. Choose here which of the resources to show in the species overview and quiz.

Select all / Unselect all

Select all / Unselect all

General description

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 Example

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.

General applicability

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.



Sources

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 ).


Authors

The BotanizeR R-package and Shiny app have been developed at Biodiversity, Macroecology and Biogeography by Patrick Weigelt & Pierre Denelle.


Citation

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.


License

Coded under License GPLv3