ID: 613 / 24

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: CITIZEN SCIENCE INITIATIVES FOR THE PROMOTION OF BOTANY

Abstract: Over the past decades, awareness for biodiversity loss has increased massively, with a particular interest in plants as sources of multiple ecosystem services. As a result, the demand for online resources as well as for training in botany has exploded. Building on the increasingly easy access to internet, various educational online resources and citizen science programmes popularizing botany have been developed, allowing students, professional and non-professional botanists to gain knowledge in plant diversity. This symposium will highlight several aspects of such initiatives, insisting on the bounds that are created between the various actors involved (designers, data gatherers, users, etc.). We expect that this symposium will feed participants' awareness and prospects. In the international and broad context of the IBC it will provide a basis for fruitful discussions and potential future collaborations. Proposed speakers include Nathalie Machon (Paris, France), who will present the popular French citizen science programme “Sauvages de ma rue” that has allowed many citizens to be aware of urban plant diversity; Valéry Malécot (Angers, France) who will introduce an original test of knowledge in Botany based on the principle of language tests; and Xavier Aubriot (Gif/Yvette, France) who will present the collaborative plant knowledge base Botascopia.

Speaker 1: Valéry Malécot Institut Agro Rennes-Angers - Département Ecologie - Angers, France valery.malecot@agrocampus-ouest.fr Title: TEPIK – Test of Plants for International Knowledge

Speaker 2: Nathalie Machon Museum national d'Histoire naturelle - CESCO - Paris, France nathalie.machon@mnhn.fr Title: A citizen science initiative to monitor urban plant biodiversity

Speaker 3: Xavier Aubriot Université Paris-Saclay - Unité Ecologie, Systématique et Evolution - Gif/Yvette, France xavier.aubriot@universite-paris-saclay.fr Title: Botascopia – An open access collaborative collection of descriptions of plants species

Topics (Up to three): Education and Outreach

Topic 2: Floristics

Topic 3: Bioinformatics

Justification: The aim of this symposium is to highlight the synergies that emerge from collaborations between researchers, students, and citizens to increase and spread scientific knowledge. Researchers have access to massive amounts of data through well-designed participatory science initiatives to monitor biodiversity in a powerful way, and the public has easy access to user-friendly resources to become familiar with various aspects of plant biodiversity.