Elizabeth Farnsworth, PhD                                                                                                    PDF

Go Botany: Integrated Tools to Advance Botanical Learning is a project to educate people about the plants of New England. New England Wild Flower Society, the oldest organization dedicated to plant conservation in the United States, is developing a multi-faceted, on-line resource designed to: i) improve self-directed scientific education in botany among novice learners, amateur and professional botanists, and citizen-scientists in New England, and ii) train science educators to integrate innovative web tools into lessons on botany and plant identification.    

   This web-based project will result in an online New England flora called Go Botany, which will build upon the Flora Novae Angliae, written by Arthur Haines and published by Yale University Press (2011), the first comprehensive scientific reference on the region’s plant species produced in the last 25 years. The educational products and innovations from this project will be nationally distributed to educational organizations and will serve as a model for engaging teenage and adult learners in science.

We seek to engage life-long learners in learning about plants in both formal and informal educational settings. The Go Botany Simple Key (released April 2012) has been user-tested with people ages 8 to 80 and is being used in classrooms, teachers participating in the Harvard Forest Schoolyard LTER Program and Project Budburst, professors teaching botany courses at the college level, instructors conducting workshops for adults, Plant Conservation Volunteers and Task Force members of the New England Wild Flower Society, professional botanists of the Natural Heritage Programs throughout New England, Garden Club members, the American Society of Botanical Artists, the Army Corps of Engineers, and many other audiences. Over 35,000 people have visited Go Botany, with the number of visits ever-increasing.

Deliverables
Simple Key ID

•  Beginners or experts can identify over 1,200 of the more common species of plants with ease.
• Users first choose what broad group their “mystery” plant belongs to; Go Botany provides videos, text, and photographs to help categorize the plant. Next, users choose what subgroup the plant is in, using the same helpful tools.
• Third, users answer some easy questions about features of the plant you can see, like bark and buds in mid-winter or flowers and fruits in summer – you choose! The Simple Key ID is smart, giving you questions based on the answers you’ve already made. It’s also friendly, minimizing jargon, and instantly giving illustrated, pop-up definitions of botanical terms. The Simple Key provides images and summary information about possible matches, so users can quickly determine the identity of the plant by the process of elimination.
• Once users have arrived at a species, visit its information page to learn lots more: fun facts and uses, maps of the species’ range, gorgeous photos, information about all its features, look-alike species, and whether it’s native, invasive, or rare in New England.