WHY ?

The difficulty encountered by non-botanists when identifying species using standard flora is centered around three major constraints, namely:

• The ability to identify the species without its flowers or before it flowers;
• The use of dichotomous key, which cannot tolerate any error and imposes the choice as well as the order of questions; and
• The use of technical terms not understood by the non-specialists.

ADVANTAGES OF IDAO

In order to minimize and resolve these constraints, the identification
system uses a graphical system which reconstitutes the plants using images.
This method has several advantages:

• It only uses drawings instead of technical jargon.
• It provides users the freedom to choose the character that needs to
  be described.
• Missing information or data are permitted, thus allowing for the
  identification of incomplete samples.
• Certain level of observational errors are also tolerated.
• At each step of the identification process, a probability of resemblance is calculated for each species.
  Thus species are sorted by decreasing order of similarity.
• At each step and moment, users could access the photos, the description, and the botanical illustrations of the species.
• In case users encounter doubt in the choice of characters (for description), they could ask the program for the most pertinent one.
• If the probability of a species identified is less than 100 percent, the program indicates the characters that contain bad description.
• Descriptions of the species can be available through Internet Website with any type of browser.
• The program being multilingual, it caters to a larger section of people.
• All the technical terms used are highlighted and at a click, an hypertext illustrated definition is accessible.
• Distribution of the species with GIS capabilities

A tool for :

• Young scientist training and capacity building
• Species identification for biodiversity studies
• Information dissemination