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IDAO Screen shots
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WHY ?
The difficulty encountered by
non-botanists when identifying species using standard flora is centered around
three major constraints, namely:
- The ability to identify the
species without its flowers or before it flowers;
- The use of dichotomous key,
which cannot tolerate any error and imposes the choice as well as the order
of questions; and
- The use of technical terms not
understood by the non-specialists.
ADVANTAGES OF IDAO
In order to minimize and resolve these
constraints, the identification
system uses a graphical system which reconstitutes the plants using images.
This method has several advantages:
- It only uses drawings instead of technical
jargon.
- It provides users the freedom to choose the
character that needs to
be described.
- Missing information or data are permitted,
thus allowing for the
identification of
incomplete samples.
- Certain level of observational errors are also
tolerated.
- At each step of the identification process, a
probability of resemblance is calculated for each species.
Thus species are sorted by decreasing order of similarity.
- At each step and moment, users could access
the photos, the description, and the botanical illustrations of the species.
- In case users encounter doubt in the choice of
characters (for description), they could ask the program for the most
pertinent one.
- If the probability of a species identified is
less than 100 percent, the program indicates the characters that contain bad
description.
- Descriptions of the species can be available
through Internet Website with any type of browser.
- The program being multilingual, it caters to a
larger section of people.
- All the technical terms used are highlighted
and at a click, an hypertext illustrated definition is accessible.
- Distribution of the species with GIS
capabilities
A tool for :
- Young scientist training and capacity building
- Species identification for biodiversity
studies
- Information dissemination
Contact Information
- Scientific Questions:
pierre.grard@cirad.fr
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General Information:
contact-amap@cirad.fr
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