Abstract
This chapter discusses the design and deployment of a citizen science application to inventory iconic medicinal non-timber forest products in the wild, such as black cohosh, ramps, and Bloodroot. The application is called PlantShoe (a pun on ‘Gumshoe’) and is used on mobile devices to collect data in the field about forest medicinal plants and their growing conditions. The users’ data is fed into a database, which they can manage, study, and share. Plantshoe data is a part of a larger regional community and consortium which is collecting information about the ecology and distribution of medicinal forest plants. Such analyses can help forest farmers and wild stewards in their processes of site selection and management of these valuable botanicals. We describe our usability engineering in the development of the PlantShoe application and enumerate key design tradeoffs we encountered. Thus, the design decisions and results of PlantShoe provide rich material for the design of future technology on the trail.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abowd GD, Mynatt ED, Rodden T (2002) The human experience [of ubiquitous computing]. IEEE Pervasive Comput 1(1):48–57
Chamberlain JL, Mitchell D, Brigham T, Hobby T, Zabek L, Davis J (2009) Forest farming practices. In: Garrett (ed) North American agroforesty: an integrated science and practice, 2nd ed, pp 219–255
Crabtree A, Chamberlain A, Grinter RE, Jones M, Rodden T, Rogers Y (2013) Introduction to the special issue of “The Turn to the Wild”. ACM Trans Comput Hum Interact (TOCHI) 20(3)
Daume S, Albert M, von Gadow K (2014) Assessing citizen science opportunities in forest monitoring using probabilistic topic modelling. Forest Ecosyst 1:11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40663-014-0011-6
Dourish P (2001) Where the action is. MIT Press, Cambridge
Gallo T, Waitt D (2011) Creating a successful citizen science model to detect and report invasive species. Bioscience 61(6):459–465. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.6.8
García MB, Silva JL, Tejero P, Pardo I, Gómez D (2019) Tracking the long-term dynamics of plant diversity in Northeast Spain with a network of volunteers and rangers. Reg Environ Change 19(2):391–401
Geovine Website (2020) https://geovine.org/vineyards/. Accessed 20 Jan 2020
Gilliam FS (2007) The ecological significance of the herbaceous layer in temperate forest ecosystems. BioScience 57(10):845–858. https://doi.org/10.1641/b571007
Handfield R, Walton SV, Sroufe R, Melnyk S (2002) Applying environmental criteria to supplier assessment: a study in the application of the Analytical Hierarchy Process. Eur J Oper Res 141:70–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0377-2217(01)00261-2
Hartson R, Pyla PS (2012) The UX Book: process and guidelines for ensuring a quality user experience. Elsevier
Havens K, Vitt P, Masi S (2012) Citizen science on a local scale: the Plants of Concern program. Front Ecol Environ 10(6):321–3
Homer CG, Dewitz JA, Yang L, Jin S, Danielson P, Xian G, Coulston J, Herold ND, Wickham JD, Megown K (2015) Completion of the 2011 National Land Cover Database for the conterminous United States-Representing a decade of land cover change information. Photogramm Eng Remote Sens 81(5):345–354
Iverson LR, Prasad AM, Matthews SN, Peters M (2008) Estimating potential habitat for 134 eastern US tree species under six climate scenarios. For Ecol Manag 254:390–406
Kim J-S, Polys N, Sforza P (2015) Preparing and evaluating geospatial data models using X3D encodings for web 3D geovisualization services. In: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on 3D web technology (Web3D ‘15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 55–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2775292.2775304
Kruger SL, Munsell JF, Chamberlain JL, Davis JM, Huish RD (2020) Projecting medicinal plant trade volume and value in deciduous forests of the Eastern United States. Forests 11(74):1–20
Lukyanenko R, Parsons J, Wiersma YF (2011) Citizen science 2.0: data management principles to harness the power of the crowd. Lect Notes Comput Sci 6629:465–473
Munsell JF, Davis JM, Chamberlain JL (2013) Forest farming. In: Gold M, Cernusca M, Hall M (eds) Training manual for applied agroforestry practices. University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry, 165p
Polys N, Newcomb C, Schenk T, Skuzinski T, Dunay D (2018) The value of 3D models and immersive technology in planning urban density. In: Proceedings of the 23rd international ACM conference on 3D web technology (Web3D ‘18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3208806.3208824
Polys N, Hotter J, Purcell L, Lanier M, Wolf J, Hession C, Sforza P, Ivory J (2017) Finding frogs: using game-based learning to increase environmental awareness. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on 3D web technology (Web3D ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA
Polys S, Hession M (2016) Extensible experiences: fusality for stream and field. In: Proceedings of the 21th international conference on 3D web technology (Web3D ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA
Radics P, Sforza P, Farrell B, Newman J, Polys N, Mosaavi A, Sutherland B, Wang H, Roghair L, Pierson M, Bock M (2015) Vineyard site assessment and simulation of grape varieties in the Eastern U.S. In: The 4th annual extreme science engineering discovery environment conference 2015 (XSEDE’15), St. Louis, MO
Rosson MB, Carroll JM (2002) Usability engineering: scenario-based development of human-computer interaction. Morgan Kaufmann
Kim S-O, Shelby B (2005) Developing standards for trail conditions using image capture technology. Leisure Sci 27(3):279–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400590930691
Sanrem Global AgroClimatology website (2020) http://arcgis-research.gis.vt.edu/cgit/global/index.html. Accessed 20 Jan 2020
Schaetzl RJ, Krist FJ Jr, Miller BA (2012) A taxonomically based ordinal estimate of soil productivity for landscape-scale analyses. Soil Sci, 177
Smith T, Kawa K, Eck V, Morton C, Stredney R (2017) Herbal supplement sales in US increase 7.7% in 2016. Mark Rep (115). http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue115/hg115-herbmarketrpt.html. Accessed Nov 2017
Sharakhov N, Polys N, Sforza P (2013a) SpeedSpy: a mobile Web3D platform for visualizing broadband data. In: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on 3D web technology (Web3D ‘13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, p 208
Sharakhov N, Polys N, Sforza P (2013b) GeoSpy: a Web3D platform for geospatial visualization. In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL international workshop on MapInteraction (MapInteract ‘13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 30–35
Soil Survey Staff, Natural Resources Conservation Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Web Soil Survey. Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) Database for all available counties in Virginia. http://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/
Starr J, Schweik CM, Bush N, Fletcher L, Finn J, Fish J et al (2014) Lights, camera…citizen science: assessing the effectiveness of smartphone-based video training in invasive plant identification. PLoS ONE 9(11):e111433. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111433
Suchman LA (1987) Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge University Press
Tilden D, Singh A, Polys NF, Sforza P (2011) Multimedia mashups for mirror worlds. In: Web3D ‘11 proceedings of the 16th international conference on 3D web technology, Paris. ACM
Vaughan RC, Munsell JF, Chamberlain JL (2013) Opportunities for enhancing non-timber forest products management in the United States. J For 111(1):26–33
Varner J (2014) Scientific outreach: toward effective public engagement with biological science. Bioscience 64(4):333–40
Weiser M (1993) Ubiquitous computing. Computer (10):71–72. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718946
Acknowledgments
Funding for PlanShoe was provided in part by eXtension Foundation and USDA NIFA. Thanks to Virginia Tech Advanced Research Computing and the Center for Geospatial Information Technology for their continued support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Polys, N., Sforza, P., Munsell, J. (2020). PlantShoe: Botanical Detectives. In: McCrickard, D.S., Jones, M., Stelter, T.L. (eds) HCI Outdoors: Theory, Design, Methods and Applications. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45288-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45289-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)