Format: ORAL

Xavier Aubriot1, Sophie Nadot1, Manon Villa2

1 Laboratory ESE (Ecology, Systematics and Evolution), University Paris-Saclay, Gif/Yvette, France 2 Tela Botanica, Montpellier, France

The teaching of Botany in France faces a paradox: waning support in academia contrasts with burgeoning public interest in plant knowledge. The success of French Botanical MOOCs reflects this unprecedented public enthusiasm. In that context, standardized descriptive sheets serve as vital pedagogical tools, offering comparability and accessibility in cataloging vegetation. In 2022, building on a first set of handmade descriptive sheets, researchers from University Paris-Saclay united with pedagogical engineers and informaticians of the French association Tela Botanica to design an open access collaborative botanical knowledgebase, BOTASCOPIA. This platform, curated by experts from different fields (botany, agronomy, ecology), invites continuous contributions from a broad audience. Input fields welcome a variety of data related to plant morphological, ecological and agroecological traits, and have been designed to maximize comparability and extraction of the data, as well as to balance the accuracy of the descriptions with the complexity of the botanical concepts. BOTASCOPIA strives for data traceability and citation of the essential references is a requirement. As output, all the data entered are available online and a subsample can be assembled into nice-looking and illustrated pdf sheets. Initially a pedagogical tool, BOTASCOPIA evolution is now directed towards broader accessibility and should ultimately be part of a larger naturalistic package that will include customizable Bayesian-inference based identification keys. Continual enhancements in structure and interface cater to BOTASCOPIA usability, promising a robust resource for botanical education and research.