Format: ORAL

Miguel Porto 1,2,3,4,5

1 CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado, Campus de Vairão, Universidade do Porto, Vairão, Portugal 2 CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal 3 BIOPOLIS Program in Genomics, Biodiversity and Land Planning, CIBIO, Campus de Vairão, Vairão, Portugal 4 EBM, Estação Biológica de Mértola, Mértola, Portugal 5 Sociedade Portuguesa de Botânica, Alverca, Portugal

The Flora-On.pt platform was conceived with the mission of sharing botanical knowledge to the widest audience possible, on the distribution, ecology, threats, phenology, morphology, biotic interactions and bioclimatic niches of the plants of a given territory. It is built upon curated crowd-sourced and scientific data of different types and sources, including distribution data from project collaborators and iNaturalist. The primary focus is to deliver intuitive tools for exploring and relating the data in useful or unexpected ways, allowing users to quickly find the answers to their specific needs, or just satisfy their curiosity. This is achieved by offering a rich set of query possibilities: textual queries with partial matching (taxonomy, common name and ecologies); morphological queries (e.g. flower color, shape, leaf characters, etc.); phenological queries (search by exact flowering date or period, based on continuous dates); geographical queries (proximity to point coordinates and occurrence within boundaries or regions - UTM grid squares, municipalities, protected areas, etc.); bioclimatic queries (search by multivariate bioclimatic envelopes); rarity queries (search by area of occurrence); ecological similarity to other species (search using bioclimatic envelope similarity); biotic interactions (e.g. search species that parasite, or are parasitized by, other species). One of the innovative features is that the queries based on continuous numerical data (flowering dates, location, bioclimatic data) work in a probabilistic workflow, delivering results tuned and sorted according to probability, thanks to internal numerical processing algorithms. To empower these possibilities, query results can be displayed in a variety of views, for example point clouds in bioclimatic spaces, aggregated abundance distributions in a GIS viewer, multiway identificatoin key, in addition to the usual photo album. The software is on its way to be publicly accessible in an open source repository, therefore enabling anyone to implement the Flora-On system in other countries, or to other biological groups.