Seminar: Jana Wäldchen

I will give a short overview about the research topics of the newly established research group Biodiversity, Ecosystems and Society. We explore how biodiversity data and digital technologies can improve our understanding and monitoring of ecological change. A core element of our work is the Flora Incognita project, which enables the automatic identification of over 30,000 plant species and, more recently, 2,000 species of fungi and lichens. With more than 10 million downloads, the Flora Incognita app has become a very famous plant identification tool.
Beyond identification, it serves as a valuable platform for different citizen science projects and supports scientific vegetation surveys. Around Flora Incognita, numerous new research directions have emerged in the last years. We investigate, for example, how the data can be used for phenological monitoring and potentially improve pollen forecasts, or how species occurrence data can help to predict environmental variables.
Future research will assess the potential of unstructured citizen science data for biodiversity monitoring, such as detecting species trends and using indicator taxa for environmental assessment.
Furthermore, we will continuously improve the automated species identification and extend these technologies to additional organism groups such as phytoplankton and insects associated with forest damage.
Another research focus will be the extraction of plant traits from images, linking phenotypic characteristics to environmental and ecological patterns. In addition, we will strengthen our efforts to investigate how citizen science initiatives enhance species knowledge and biodiversity awareness in society.