Icky bugs and plant blindness: Novel identification tools to promote biodiversity observations

Background/Question/Methods

In the USA and throughout the developed world, people are losing touch with nature. The rich experience of watching and caring for local plants and animals as children is a common experience for ecologists, but rare among our colleagues and neighbours.Video games and text messaging are surplanting daisy chain necklaces and collecting buckets. Louv’s book, “Last Child in the Woods”, describes how the loss of nearby wild habitat and opportunities for unstructured play go to the root of the growing disconnect between children and nature. It is no wonder then that beetles, ants, millipedes, grasshoppers, slugs, and spiders have all become “icky bugs”. While many children can still identify dandelions, the "scourge" of suburban lawns, few make tree forts, carve sticks, pick wild strawberries, or bring home turtles and snakes. For children and most adults, individual plants and plant species merge into one large, unknowable, green mass- a phenomenon termed “plant blindness” by Wandersee and Schussler.

With this low awareness of the biological world, societies may lose the foresight to conserve our biodiversity heritage, which provides so many ecosystem goods and services. Yet people do have an innate love of nature that was recently encapsulated by Wilson’s Biophilia hypothesis.

Results/Conclusions

The Electronic Field Guide (EFG, http://www.electronicfieldguide.org) project was developed to take advantage of our innate interest and varied needs to learn about and monitor biodiversity. Constructed using open source software, EFG products make it relatively easy for non-technical people to create, publish, and share identification guides. The software has browse, search, and picture key options for identification. Taxon page accounts can be created with templates or crafted for individual needs.

It is easy to construct guides using spreadsheets to organize text, images, and multimedia data. We will demonstrate how to view and configure EFGs using plants and ants of Massachusetts. Guides can be published in electronic form on websites, or PDAs, or in hardcopy form as laminated sheets or books. We will compare EFG features with other options such as Discovery Life or Lucid.