This York gum tree is located in Western Australia and is one of the trees included
in the database of the Global Vegetation Project recently launched by the UW Biodiversity
Institute. The mission of the community science project is to inspire and empower
people of all ages to learn about the diversity of vegetation on Earth and to provide
educators with a resource for teaching online. (John Dwyer Photo)
Scottish American naturalist John Muir once said that “between every two pines, there
is a doorway to a new world.”
The University of Wyoming’s Biodiversity Institute is looking to expand that doorway
beyond just the pines -- to other trees, wildflowers, cacti and other vegetation worldwide
with its Global Vegetation Project.
The mission of the Global Vegetation Project is to inspire and empower people of all
ages to learn about the diversity of vegetation on Earth and to provide educators
with a resource for teaching online. The goal is to bring the field into the classroom
in a way that was previously impossible, enabling visual and interactive experiences
that link vegetation and climate at the global scale.
“Our focus is global in scope. We are getting lots of photos from South America, which
is exciting,” says Daniel Laughlin, project director for the Global Vegetation Project.
“But, naturally, many of our first photos are from North America, and we have plans
to make sure that the Rocky Mountain and High Plains ecoregions are well represented
in the database for use in Wyoming schools.”
“It's a community science project allowing users to access, and add to, a database
of vegetation photographs that can be explored interactively through an online mapped
interface,” says Bryce Tugwell, web content developer and digital storyteller for
the Biodiversity Institute.
Anyone with an internet connection will be able to challenge themselves to tackle
a variety of learning outcomes.
These learning outcomes are:
-- Determining differences and similarities among vegetation types across the globe.
-- Understanding how climate shapes vegetation.
-- Hypothesizing how climate change might affect the distribution of vegetation types
in the future.
“We do encourage people to share their unique vegetation with the project,” Laughlin
says. “We want it to be a one-stop shop for open access vegetation photos, and to
celebrate the immense diversity of vegetation worldwide.”
When a photo is submitted, the project team conducts quality control to make sure
the location of the photo is correct, and that the photo is appropriate. Then, the
team takes the location of the photo and spatially joins it to other spatial data
layers to determine biome, ecoregion, province/country, mean annual temperature, mean
annual precipitation, and temperature and precipitation averages by month to create
Walter-Lieth climate diagrams.
“We plan to develop lesson plans to teach students about the relationship between
vegetation types and these climate diagrams,” Laughlin says.
The project was inspired both by the increased need for online field ecology teaching
resources as well as the lack of a single e-repository with information on the diversity
of vegetation types across the globe, according to the project website.
The project is similar to iNaturalist, but with a focus on communities of plant vegetation
rather than individual species. With the help of user-submitted photos, location information
and vegetation information, the Global Vegetation Project will create an interactive
map where “travelers” can virtually navigate to points to explore vegetation types,
Laughlin says.
Travelers can explore using a global map or by using a Whittaker biome diagram, which
illustrates how vegetation types relate to temperature and precipitation. Alternatively,
vegetation can be viewed by filtering for specific regions, biomes or presence of
individual species. The Whittaker biome diagram is a fundamental starting point for
understanding the vegetation of the world.
“While this will eventually develop into a community science initiative, we do require
the contributors to identify the vegetation type and a few dominant species in the
photo,” Laughlin explains. “So, some base-level knowledge is required at present.”
This Patagonian steppe from Argentina is one of many photos of vegetation on the UW
Biodiversity Institute’s webpage for its Global Vegetation Project. (Alejandra Maza
Photo)
While still under discussion, the group has considered relaxing this assumption, with
the possibility of allowing anyone to submit photos without having to know species
and vegetation types.
To create awareness and interest in the project, Laughlin says social media accounts
have been created on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Sienna Wessel, a master’s student
from Champaign, Ill., majoring in botany and the project’s science communications
manager, has created two videos that will be posted on the project’s website and distributed
via social media. Additionally, the group plans to send targeted emails to vegetation
scientists around the world to invite them to contribute. Laughlin says he has sent
messages to email listservs such as ECOLOG.
With a National Science Foundation grant Laughlin has secured, he says it will be
used to hire an RET (Research Experience for Teachers) position next summer.
“This teacher will work with us to learn about vegetation diversity across climatic
gradients; develop curricula for grade school- and high school-level students; and
travel across the region and take photos for the project,” Laughlin says. “Our long-term
goal is to develop teaching lessons for a variety of grade levels, and the RET will
be an important component to that.”
Laughlin relies on a small group of collaborators to keep the project moving forward.
Shannon Albeke, a senior research scientist with the Wyoming Geographic Information
Science Center (WyGISC) was instrumental in developing the database and web map services for the application.
The Advanced Research Computing Center on campus has provided support for hosting
the database and the server. Jesse Fleri, a first-year Ph.D. student from Lake Forest,
Calif., in the Program in Ecology and botany, is the R Shiny app developer. Tugwell
enabled the web interface in the UW Biodiversity Institute as part of its facilitation
of externally funded broader impacts of research.
To submit a photo(s), fill out the form at www.gveg.wyobiodiversity.org/index.php/entry-submission.
For more information about the Global Vegetation Project, go to the website at www.gveg.wyobiodiversity.org; Facebook at www.facebook.com/GlobalVegProj/; Twitter at www.twitter.com/GlobalVegProj; and Instagram at www.instagram.com/globalvegproj/.
For videos about the Global Vegetation Project, go to https://drive.google.com/file/d/1asQVTN1PanqFOBK7PuPMP31TBp1LCH7_/view and https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_5pbPtcrenWaHVGY812LO5idPuEDGkLG/view.
About the Biodiversity Institute
The mission of the Biodiversity Institute is to foster the understanding, appreciation
and conservation of biological diversity through innovative research, education and
outreach; and by engaging a broad audience in the scientific process.
