The essential story of Pl@ntNet is the story of people convinced that knowledge and education are powerful levers to reinforce the consideration of biodiversity in all human activities. They allow both to raise the subject in the concerns of citizens, but also to encourage everyone to act, in their professional field and in their personal life.
Pl@ntNet is essentially a collaborative project which, like wikipedia, is based on the sharing and transmission of knowledge. It is therefore essential that the most expert people help us to review the contributions of the most novices. The performance of the recognition algorithm is in fact directly related to the nature of the images in the database.
There are mechanisms in Pl@ntNet that give more weight to users according to their expertise (number of shared species, number of validated observations, number of revised observations, etc.). Even if you are not 100% sure of a species name correction proposal, you should never hesitate to enter it in the application. A more experienced botanist will come back later and correct your proposal if he thinks it is wrong. In the meantime, your own level of expertise will already be very useful compared to probably more novice people who made a mistake.
To review an observation, simply access the photo gallery of the species and click on the photo that you think is problematic. Next to the species name associated with this photo (at the top of the screen), you will then see a small pencil that will allow you to enter a new species name or confirm an existing one. This can also be done on the web version of Pl@ntNet, by following the same procedure and entering a new name in the module entitled “Suggested Names”.
We hope that this information will help you better understand how the application works and encourage new collaborators to contribute to its improvement. The most common species include those that are subject to the most noise in the database. Being much more in the spotlight, they generate more errors than the less observed species. It is therefore important that people who are familiar with these species or have a direct link with them in their professional activity take ownership of their knowledge management in Pl@ntNet. The Pl@ntNet team itself has a few very expert botanists, but they cannot, of course, review the tens of thousands of species and millions of images in the database.
So it is only through knowledge sharing that Pl@ntNet already works so well and will work even better in the future.
Pl@ntNet belongs to YOU!
