Seminar: Susanne Tautenhahn

We introduce mobile crowd sensing of plants as a novel sensing approach for mapping climate, soil, and disturbance factors across scales. Bio-indication allows to infer environmental conditions from plant occurrences based on their ecological niches. Leveraging automated plant identification apps such as Flora Incognita and citizen science millions of opportunistic plant occurrence data become available which will further increase in the future. In combination with recent advancements in pan European bio-indicator value systems this enables us to map environmental factors over large extents. Currently, mobile sensing achieves resolutions of 0.25° across Europe and up to 100m in urban areas due to a higher citizen participation. Cross-consistency checks against traditional environmental data sources and expert vegetation mappings support a high reliability for temperature, and soil pH variations based on mobile sensing. Importantly, we can also map environmental factors for which traditional data-sets are very uncertain or lacking and therefore allow new insights, such as disturbance severity and frequency, grazing pressure, mowing frequency, soil disturbance, light, soil moisture, salt, and nutrients. Three applications will illustrate the potential of mobile sensing: mapping of effective bio-environmental regions, high-resolution analysis of urban environments, and a community engagement to better understand ecosystem-atmosphere carbon and water fluxes measured by FLUXNET.