Campus Flora

About this resource

Description

CampusFlora is an app that maps the location of individual plants and provides botanical information for each species. The app started as a way to address botanical literacy, but is now a device to explore human-plant relationships. The app has inbuilt functionality to craft trails (e.g. evolution of land plants, the ‘eucalypts’, ClimateWatch Citizen Science trail) that highlight important aspects of select plant groups and align with the current botanical curriculum. These trails also have appeal for the broader campus community. Staff and students in other discipline areas have been encouraged to partner with us in developing new trails, particularly trails that draw from multiple disciplines and that champion botanical literacy and human-plant connections.

In a collaboration that spans research, teaching and outreach, the app now offers the Patyegarang, Sydney Language trail to make the language of the Gadi more visible and accessible. In a similar vein, the pin yins of plants native to China are offered, and the Tupi name for our iconic Jacaranda.

Length

Multi-week

Pedagogical backing

Rationale

The development of the CampusFlora app included undergraduate partners from Botany, Ecology, and Engineering. Alignment of CampusFlora content to the undergraduate Life Science curriculum has seen uptake of CampusFlora by Botany and Ecology students (2014 – current). The botanical content has inspired Music composition; and, further enhancements (2017 – 2018) have made CampusFlora a useful Cultural Competence and Health and Wellbeing engagement tool for the campus community.

How is the resource used

The app supports a range of self-directed or prescribed activities. It allows for learning in outdoor spaces, transforming the campus into a living laboratory. Trails can be created and aligned to a range of curricula, such that students can be directed to locate and identify specimens to achieve specific learning objectives. In addition, the CampusFlora software has been developed to be shareable so those at other institutions can have their own CampusFlora, thereby growing a network across the continent. This network would provide a mechanism for cross­ institutional student collaborations to work on large-scale experiments in botany and ecology.

Authors

Rosanne Quinnell (rosanne.quinnell@sydney.edu.au)

CampusFlora is the product of collaborations between staff and students where we have used a “students as partners” model. Our undergraduates have advised on the user interface, co-authored papers and contributed photographs. Students who have contributed to the project include Lachlan Pettit, Caroline Cheung, Richard Dimon, Grant Zeng, Angela Pursey, Scott Dong, Alex Ling, Simon Baeg, Liam Huang, Kevin Ahn, Michael Johnston and Ahmed Jamal Shadid.