ITR: An Electronic Field Guide: Plant Exploration and Discovery in the 21st Century

This project is developing the first generation of electronic field guides: computing devices that allow a taxonomist in the field access to critical comparative information on plant species. Currently, when botanists in the field collect specimens and want to verify the existence of a new species, they must borrow physical samples from museums and herbaria, such as the Smithsonian type specimen collection. This process is extremely time-consuming and inefficient. The electronic field guide will speed and automate this process. At the core of the system will be a type specimen digital collection. This will include digital images of 95,000 botanical type specimens, the definitive reference specimens used to identify new species. This core data will be linked to photos both of additional specimens and of live plants. The investigators will also develop algorithms for visual plant recognition. These will be central to searching images in the digital collection, in conjunction with conventional text search. Finally, this project will work toward the creation of a set of mobile and wearable prototypes with novel user interfaces so that botanists in the field can photograph plants and access the system with these photos and text. A completed system will allow field botanists to have at their fingertips information that is currently housed only in special collections far from where the specimens are discovered. It will also provide content-based retrieval that goes well beyond current methods for navigating this knowledge. These new technologies will greatly accelerate the discovery and identification of the remaining undescribed plants of the world.