Botascopia: a digital setup for generating low-tech plant field guides

Plant field guides are portable reference books or digital tools designed to help various users identify plant species in a given area and find out about their morphology, ecology and usage. We present Botascopia (botascopia.inria.fr), a combination of digital tools that automatically produce low-tech field guides in the form of printed paper booklets containing species description sheets associated with an identification key. These are analogous to floras adapted to local ecosystems, such as gardens, parks, school yards or campuses. Botascopia contains a participatory knowledge base with detailed descriptions of plant species. It uses computational languages to express different perspectives on plants held by expert botanists and novice observers, for example, and the translations between them. This setup therefore contributes to addressing the usual challenge of balancing precise vocabulary with making botanical knowledge accessible beyond expert communities. We tested this approach during botanical field sessions with diverse audiences, providing them with personalised, automatically generated printed booklets. This experiment explores how combining low- and high-tech approaches can contribute to the study of the relationships between technology, humans, and plants in the Anthropocene.