We are pleased to inform you
the release of BIOTA - The Biodiversity App. The application was
developed at the C V Raman Laboratory of Ecological Informatics, Indian
Institute of Information Technology and Management - Kerala (IIITM-K).
Although BIOTA is envisioned as a
holistic biogeography App; the released version focus on invasive plant
species. Foresters, ecologists and researchers will be able to use BIOTA to
report presence of invasive species as they come across. They are only required
to collect a photo of species observed using their smart phone. BIOTA will
geo-flag the information on Google Map in real time. The data concurrently gets
appended on to a dedicated database.
BIOTA can be downloaded from
Google Play Store. The current version (1.0) will work on Android devices. It
was developed and demonstrated as a part of National Biodiversity Conference
2017 in February 2017 at Trivandrum, India.
Widespread adoption of the App is
expected to plug a big gap in species modeling and thereby aid biodiversity
conservation. In subsequent releases we look forward to make BIOTA more
intelligent and include more species.
