Section: New Software and Platforms

ThePlantGame: crowdsourced plants identification

Participants : Maximilien Servajean [contact] , Alexis Joly, Julien Champ.

URL: http://theplantgame.com/

The Plant Game is a participatory game whose purpose is the production of large masses of taxonomic data to improve our knowledge of biodiversity. The interest of the game is twofold: (i) train and progress in botany while having fun, and (ii) participate to a large citizen sciences project in biodiversity. The game relies on consistent scientific contributions compared to classical crowdsourcing models and algorithms that are not scalable to classification problems with thousands of complex classes such as plant species. The most remarkable one is the active training of the users based on innovative sub-task creation and assignment processes that are adaptive to the increasing skills of the user. The first public version of the game was released in July 2015. Nowadays, about 1000 players are registered and produce on average about 35 new validated plant observations per day. The accuracy of the produced taxonnomic tags is about $94\%$, which is quite impressive considering the fact that a majority of users are beginners when they start playing.