Pl@ntnet tool - Plant diversity and Citizen Science

Data analytics project based on Plant@net tool large dataset (+12 million entries) on plant diversity collected by citizen science.

General Information

This project analizes the data gathered by users of the Pl@ntnet app from all over the world since 2010 and it is still ongoing.

The original dataset is comprised of over 12 million entries. For the current project, a random subset of 150.000 entries was used.

Aims of the project

• Understand the app users' behaviour by analyzing temporal and geographical patterns to (potencially) design future campaings to increase the reach.
• Study plants registered at different levels (order, genus) to plan strategies for gathering information on underrepresented categories.

Outlook

Ideas and suggestions for further analysis

Plants

• Species identified and urban areas: is there a connection?
• Find patterns in identified plants: urban plants, garden plants, edible.

Users behaviour

• Find and study information about people with smartphone per region/country and connect it to entries in the app.
• Study correlation between online trends and entries in the app.

Information about Pl@ntnet

As mentioned in their website:

"Pl@ntNet is a tool to help to identify plants with pictures. It is organized in different thematic and geographical floras. Choose the one that corresponds to your region or area of interest from the list below. If you don't know what to choose, select "World flora" which has the widest coverage but will give less accurate results than a more focused flora."

For more information, check the Plant@net website available in several languages.

Full dataset

The full dataset, with more than 12 million entries, is available in GBIF.

GBIF.org (20 April 2023) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.jq4aez

Other information

For a better understanding of the regions where the users come from, I used the following information:

Global internet usage

Gapminder dataset from Kaggle

GapMinder collects data from a handful of sources, including the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the US Census Bureau’s International Database, the United Nations Statistics Division, and the World Bank.

Countries list with alpha2 codes

From dadahub.io

• ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 English country names and code elements. This list states the country names (official short names in English) in alphabetical order as given in ISO 3166-1 and the corresponding ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 code elements.
• This list is updated whenever a change to the official code list in ISO 3166-1 is effected by the ISO 3166/MA.
• It lists 250 official short names and code elements as of Dec 2012.

License : This material is licensed by its maintainers under the Public Domain Dedication and License

Google Trends

Google Trends is available in different languages.

I gathered historical data (last 5 years) of the following terms/topics:

• plant/planta
• plant identification app/aa identificacion plantas
• gardening/jardinería

Data in GoogleTrends is a combination of:

• Knowledge graph topics
• Search interests
• Google News articles

Algorithm ranks according to:

• Relative increase in volume
• Absolute volume of searches