Section: New Software and Platforms

The Plant Game: crowdsourced plants identification

Participants : Maximilien Servajean, Alexis Joly [contact] , Antoine Affouard.

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 objective is to learn botany with fun and participate to a large citizen sciences project in biodiversity. The game relies on consistent research contributions in scalable crowdsourcing models and algorithms that can deal with thousands of complex classes such as plant species. One major contribution 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. As of today, about 22K players are registered and produce hundreds of new validated plant observations per day. The accuracy of the produced taxonomic tags is about $94\%$, which is quite impressive considering the fact that a majority of users are beginners when they start playing.