Disseny i valoració d’Apps per a la determinació d’espècies vegetals: UikiPlant

Abstract

"Design and valuation of Apps for the determination of plant species" is the study and creation of UikiPlant, an application for the identification of trees and shrubs. UikiPlant is an application that aims to unite the field of environmental science with the new technologies field in order to create a product that gets the relation, connection and the awareness between the people and the nature stronger. For this purpose, a bibliographic search has been made in order to find out which applications currently exist to identify vegetal species, followed by a study of each one to discover their uses, utility and scope of applicability. After that, it has been discovered that most of them are free access, covering a wide geographical area and offering English as the main language. Besides, they can be used without any previous knowledge and most of them need pictures to accomplish the identification. In the surveys that have been made for this work, it has been discovered that the most famous application for the survey respondent is Pl@ntNet and it is also the most downloaded. However, 60% of the survey respondent did not know about the existence of any kind of application for this purpose, but more of the 75% would have used them during the field trips. Besides, all of them find more convenient not to need internet to use the application and between the 23% and the 25% would be willing to pay for it. Those are the reasons why it has been created an enjoyable, dynamic and easy to use application that allows to identify the trees or bush species that users are interested in. UikiPlant is supposed to be a free access application available in Catalan and hopefully, in the future, also in Spanish and English. It is not only easy to use but to take along to the field trips as well, with the future intention of making it work without any Internet connection. The application includes all the trees and bush species that can be found in the Campus Montilivi surroundings, at the Girona University and it specifies their common name besides the scientific name, accompanied by pictures. In this way, the users that want to make a route around this area, can identify in a simple, quickly and enjoyable manner those species around them. Finally, it has to be said that UikiPlant is designed such as different people with distinct abilities and knowledge can use it, from fond of nature to botany students