Species list





















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.

This Example

In this particular instance of the BotanizeR Shiny app you can practice 128 woody species from Germany based on images of various plant characteristics in winter state. Only the German name, family and floristic status in Germany are drawn in addition from FloraWeb.

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 includes images of plants in winter state 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