@article{9379a2b5f95b4135bcff9b1eea01f9bb,
title = "Plant-O-Matic: a dynamic and mobile guide to all plants of the Americas",
abstract = "Advances in both informatics and mobile technology are providing exciting new opportunities for generating, disseminating, and engaging with information in the biological sciences at unprecedented spatial scales, particularly in disentangling information on the distributions and natural history of hyperdiverse groups of organisms. We describe an application serving as a mobile catalog of all of the plants of the Americas developed using species distribution models estimated from field observations of plant occurrences. The underlying data comprise over 3·5 million standardized observations of over 88 000 plant species. Plant-O-Matic, a free iOS application, combines the species distribution models with the location services built into a mobile device to provide users with a list of all plant species expected to occur in the 100 × 100 km geographic grid cell corresponding to the user's location. The application also provides ancillary information on species{\textquoteright} attributes (when available) including growth form, reproductive mode, flower color, and common name. Results can be searched and conditionally filtered based on these attributes. Links to externally sourced specimen images further aid in identification of species by the user. The application's ability to assemble locally relevant lists of plant species and their attributes on demand for anywhere in the Americas provides a powerful new tool for identifying, exploring, and understanding plant diversity. Mobile applications such as Plant-O-Matic can facilitate dynamic new approaches to science, conservation, and science education.",
keywords = "botany, educational outreach, field guide, mobile app, natural history, smartphone, species identification, taxonomy",
author = "Goldsmith, {Gregory R.} and Naia Morueta-Holme and Brody Sandel and Fitz, {Eric D.} and Fitz, {Samuel D.} and Brad Boyle and Nathan Casler and Kristine Engemann and J{\o}rgensen, {Peter M.} and Kraft, {Nathan J.B.} and Brian McGill and Peet, {Robert K.} and Piel, {William H.} and Nick Spencer and Svenning, {Jens Christian} and Thiers, {Barbara M.} and Cyrille Violle and Wiser, {Susan K.} and Enquist, {Brian J.}",
note = "Funding Information: Application development was supported by a contract with Ocotea Technologies LLC to G.R.G., E.D.F., and S.D.F This work was conducted as a part of the Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) Working Group, 2008–2012 (PIs B.J.E., B.B., R.K.P., Steven Dolins, and Richard Condit) supported by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a center funded by NSF (Grant #EF-0553768), the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the State of California. The BIEN Working Group was also supported by The iPlant Collaborative (NSF #DBI-0735191; URL: www.iplantcollaborative.org). We thank all of the scientists who have contributed to and supported various BIEN working group meetings since 2008. We thank the numerous individual data contributors and >500 herbaria who contributed their data to various data compiling organizations for the invaluable data and support provided to BIEN. We especially thank the following institutions for direct data access: Global Biodiversity Information Facility, World Information Network on Biodiversity, The speciesLink Project, New York Botanical Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, Utrecht Herbarium, University of Arizona Herbarium, North Carolina State University Herbarium, and University of North Carolina Herbarium. Vegetation inventory data were provided by Amazon Forest Inventory Network, Carolina Vegetation Survey, Center for Tropical Forest Science, SALVIAS, Tropical Ecology and Assessment Monitoring Network, United States Forest Inventory and Analysis National Program, and VegBank. The staff at iPlant and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas provided critical computational assistance. N.M.-H. was supported by an EliteForsk Award, the Aarhus University Research Foundation, and the Villum Foundation. C.V. was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Program (DiversiTraits project, no. 221060) and by the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant Project {\textquoteleft}Ecophysiological and biophysical constraints on domestication in crop plants{\textquoteright} (Grant ERC-StG-2014-639706-CONSTRAINTS). J.C.S. and B.J.E. were supported by the Center for Informatics Research on Complexity in Ecology (CIRCE), funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation under the AU Ideas program, and the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant: ERC-2012-StG-310886-HISTFUNC). G.R.G. and E.H.F. were supported by a National Geographic Society Waitt Grant. G.R.G was supported by funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 290605 (COFUND: PSI-FELLOW). Funding for application development was provided by the College of Science, University of Arizona, and the Aspen Center for Environmental Science to B.J.E. We thank J. Ruiz, J. Cundiff, C.Lane, J.Murdock, and P. Lopes for their encouragement, as well as the reviewers and editors for constructive comments on the manuscript. Plant-O-Matic is a free iOS application available at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/plant-o-matic/id906932765. Data and application code are deposited in the KNB repository: https://knb.ecoinformatics.org/#view/doi:10.5063/F16W9800 (Goldsmith et al.). The repository for the most current application code is available at: https://github.com/efitz/plantomatic. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2016 The Authors. Methods in Ecology and Evolution {\textcopyright} 2016 British Ecological Society",
year = "2016",
month = aug,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1111/2041-210X.12548",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "7",
pages = "960--965",
journal = "Methods in Ecology and Evolution",
issn = "2041-210X",
publisher = "John Wiley and Sons Inc.",
number = "8",
}