Project leaders: Christel Vignau (Tela Botanica NGO director), Pierre Bonnet (CIRAD researcher), Alexis Joly (Inria researcher)
The Floris’tic initiative aims at promoting numerical vegetal sciences to help bridging the educational gap in botany. It relies on a consortium of 3 organisms with complementary expertise in botany, computer sciences and community management.
If agricultural development is to be successful and biodiversity is to be conserved, then accurate knowledge of the identity, geographic distribution and uses of plants is essential. Unfortunately, such basic information is often only partially available for professional stakeholders, teachers, scientists and citizens, and often incomplete for ecosystems that possess the highest plant diversity, e.g. Mediterranean regions. One of the main problem is the increasing lack of human skills in plant sciences and botany. Only few dedicated scholar programs still exist and the attractiveness of the discipline is very low because of its lack of visibility.
The objective of the project is to help bridging this educational gap through 3 main actions:
- structuring and emergence of relay communities to favor educational innovation in plant sciences: development of dedicated social networking tools, regional communities management, events, workshops, communication.
- development of a platform enabling creation, access and sharing of data and knowledge about plants: electronic floras, mobile identification and observation tools, collaborative data management applications, immersive discovery tools
- Educational and sensitization actions: MOOC of botany, rider training program, citizen sciences projects