About TeleNature

NSF/BDI #0113918 TeleNature is a powerful interactive tool that provides researchers of widely varying skill levels with various important biological resources. Its key feature is aiding these researchers in effectively identifying plant and animal species both in the field and in the classroom using a portable verison of BIBE. Researchers collecting data can use wireless technology such as laptop computers and PDAs to search through descriptions and pictures of species, or to get remote help from expert botanists and entomologists, all while still in the field. Because of the ready availability of resources, this system of technology makes gathering biological data a much more efficient process, with the added benefit of making learning faster and smarter for teachers and students of science.

The surveyor's wireless device (the PDA or laptop) connects to a field server nearby, which in turn uses a cellular or mobile phone modem to connect to the central or base server miles away. The problem of slow mobile connections is solved by the adaptability of data and species lists, so that a limited list of species native to his or her geographic location can be loaded into a researchers wireless device (i.e. cached) and be ready for quick retrieval.

The proposal is available at the following link (http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~TeleNature/publications/BDCE2001d.pdf).

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About OpenKey

OpenKey works to develop a new visually interactive system of identifying species of plants using an electronic database (two polyclave keys) of pictures with a focus on the plant life of Illinois and North Carolina. Unlike existing tools for identifying species, OpenKey allows many experts in many different places to contribute pictures and descriptions that automatically become part of the overall database which will capture the way the experts identify plant species.

The project also teaches citizen botanical researchers (ranging from high-school students to amateur botanists) to use this more efficient method of identifying species. In turn, OpenKey uses the experiences of these nonprofessionals to improve itself, evolving to include a wider, more user-friendly set of search terms that will ultimately revolutionize the resources available to botanists of all levels of skill and interest.

The project is a collaboration between the two top-ranked Library & Information Science programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). It currently uses the vast collections of plant species housed in the Herbarium of the University of Illinois, the North Carolina Botanical Garden, the UNC Herbarium and the Illinois Natural History Survey Herbarium.

We are funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The proposal is available at http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~pheidorn/papers/IMLS_Publiccopy.pdf

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About BIBE

The Biological Information Browsing Environment (BIBE) is a facility to help novices and experts find information about plants and animals in digital collections. The Project is funded by the National Science Foundation Biological Databases and Informatics Program and is a collaboration between the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Illinois Natural History Survey, Missouri Botanical Garden, Flora of North America Project at the Harvard Herbarium, and Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

The objectives of the Project are to facilitate access to online flora and fauna by both novices and experts through enhanced indexing, searching, and visualization techniques. Specific search facility and content will be added to help users with different levels of domain knowledge identify species based on the augmentation of professionally developed taxonomic treatments or species descriptions. This is a novel use of taxonomic descriptions. In the course of development the system will undergo a series of qualitative and quantitative evaluations and re-designs by several communities of users, including professional entomologists and botanists as well as citizen scientists performing biodiversity surveys.

For more details, see an article titled A Tool for Multipurpose Use of Online Flora and Fauna: The Biological Information Browsing Environment (BIBE) in the First Monday (Volume 6, Number 2 - February 5th 2001), a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet, by P. Bryan Heidorn, PI on the project.

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