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

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Research Objectives:

To build a digital collection of the Smithsonian's collection of specimens and provide means to access it with text and photos of plants, using portable computing devices in the field.

Approach:

We are in the process of digitizing specimens in the form of high-resolution photos. We will also explore 3D digitization methods. We are applying visual object recognition techniques to match photos of new specimens to this data. We plan to combine this with text queries and user feedback to have a "Google-like" prototype for plant specimens. We are developing mobile user interfaces that use hand-held and head-worn devices to provide access to these capabilities in the field.

Broader Impact:

By providing efficient access to a digital herbarium, we hope to greatly accelerate the discovery and identification of the remaining undescribed plants of the world.

Significant Results:

The type specimen digitization project has produced images of 64,000 specimens. With NSF funds we have upgraded equipment and are now producing 48 megabyte images. We are also in the process of gathering an extensive set of images for a prototype system of all plants on Plummer's Island.

This project is supported in part by NSF Grant IIS-03-25867 (ITR: An Electronic Field Guide: Plant Exploration and Discovery in the 21st Century) and by the Washington Biologists' Field Club.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views, opinions, or policy of the National Science Foundation (NSF).