Developing the living atlas of east african flora for participatory conservation

Background/Question/Methods

East Africa is home to unique and diverse plant communities. Most notable is Ethiopia’s rich plant diversity, consisting of 6,000+ documented species, almost of which are 20% endemic. However, no centralized, publicly available portal exists to collect, aggregate, update, synthesize, disseminate, and visualize plant species occurrence and diversity data for the region. We developed an online living atlas of East African floral diversity that integrates new information (e.g., species occurrences, plot data, and local/traditional ecological knowledge) with legacy data. We used participatory design approaches to engage students at Wondo-Genet College of Forestry to participate in, and contribute to, the design of the atlas. Students ranked web mapping and searching user interface elements using Likert-scale responses to inform system design decisions. We then pre-populated the atlas with Ethiopian plant data (single species occurrences and multi-scale vegetation plot data) to test different modalities and applications of system use.

Results/Conclusions

Participatory design results show that local users prefer simple user interface designs for web mapping and database searching features. Simple user interface elements that reduce the number of clicks and pages to navigate such as buttons for actions, modal dialog boxes for more complicated tasks, and tabs for content organization are preferred. Stakeholder involvement at each step of the design process, an open and participatory cyber-infrastructure system, and a clean and simple user interface increases system adoption and facilitates continued use. Initial data used to pre-populate the atlas illustrates the synergistic value of integrating disparate data from many community-based, citizen science projects with professional datasets. Results demonstrate the importance of community-contributed, yet also standardized and vetted measurements with associated controlled vocabularies. Future system development will focus on features that summarize and visualize data through maps of diversity, sampling effort, endemism, and species distribution to guide conservation actions and outcomes.