A look inside the Pl@ntNet experience

Alexis Joly (1) , Pierre Bonnet (2, 3) , Hervé Goëau (1) , Julien Barbe (2) , Souheil Selmi (2) , Julien Champ (1) , Samuel Dufour-Kowalski (2) , Antoine Affouard (2) , Jennifer Carré (4) , Jean-François Molino (2) , Nozha Boujemaa (5) , Daniel Barthélémy (3, 2)

1 ZENITH - Scientific Data Management
2 UMR AMAP - Botanique et Modélisation de l'Architecture des Plantes et des Végétations
3 Cirad-BIOS - Département Systèmes Biologiques
4 Tela Botanica
5 Inria Saclay - Ile de France

Pl@ntNet is an innovative participatory sensing platform relying on image-based plants identification as a mean to enlist non-expert contributors and facilitate the production of botanical observation data. One year after the public launch of the mobile application, we carry out a self-critical evaluation of the experience with regard to the requirements of a sustainable and effective ecological surveillance tool. We first demonstrate the attractiveness of the developed multimedia system (with more than 90K end-users) and the nice self-improving capacities of the whole collaborative workflow. We then point out the current limitations of the approach towards producing timely and accurate distribution maps of plants at a very large scale. We discuss in particular two main issues: the bias and the incompleteness of the produced data. We finally open new perspectives and describe upcoming realizations towards bridging these gaps.

Domaines: Biodiversité et Ecologie; Bio-informatique [q-bio.QM]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Multimédia [cs.MM]

Alexis Joly, Pierre Bonnet, Hervé Goëau, Julien Barbe, Souheil Selmi, et al.. A look inside the Pl@ntNet experience. Multimedia Systems, 2016, 22 (6), pp.751-766. ⟨10.1007/s00530-015-0462-9⟩. ⟨hal-01182775⟩