[Reader-list] Khetro Broadsheet02 article- LIFKEY/LIFDAT Identification Keys for PLants and Animals

[Arijit Paul]

Dear friends,
I have got of the khetro broadsheet02. This issue focuses on the ongoing debate about the changing shape of cinema and theatre with the intervention of newer  technologies. It also carries articles on Bengali desktop on Linux platform, and the development of interactive identification keys for monitoring biodiversity. I think the articles will be of interest to many of you. So I am posting them for open reading and discussion.
Arijit.  
 
FOURTH POSTING:
 LIFKEY / LIFDAT Identification Keys for Plants and Animals 
 

 

Introduction 

We live in a land rich in diversity of life. With a little over 2% of world's land mass India harbours around 8% of its plant and animal species. We also lead the world's tropical, biodiversity rich countries in our knowledge of our plants and animals. Yet, this knowledge is fragmentary, and much more information is needed to address the challenge of conserving and sustainably using these biodiversity resources effectively. Given the tremendous variation from place to place and time to time in the distribution of biodiversity, there was a need for developing a countrywide system of inventory and periodically monitoring biodiversity. For this purpose one needs experts and the experts will need to be an integral part of a network involving participants from every school, college and university, from every village and town. But for such a participatory effort to be possible, people must have easy access to attractively prepared information on our living heritage which are already been
 prepared and documented. 

A beginning in this direction was made in 1942 with the publication of Salim AIi's "Book of Indian Birds". With its colour plates and succinct accounts, this book has served to attract thousands of people to bird watching, and these people have, in turn, generated a great deal of information on India's bird life, as may be seen from the unbroken publication over forty years of the "Newsletter for Bird-watchers". But even then very limited additional material on birds and other groups of plants and animals has become available over the last 62 years. There are several reasons behind it including the lack of serious research and fieldwork, and cost ineffectiveness of printing such books with accurate colour plates of groups of plants or animals. Now with the advent of digital technology which is easily accessible, user-friendly and inexpensive, new and effective documentation devices have emerged. 

 

Interactive identification keys 

LlKEY/LlFDAT, a part of the Project Lifescape of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Academy of Sciences, is an attempt to take advantage of easy accessible digital technology to develop attractive, user-friendly resource material. This material aims to inform all people, especially the youth, about the wealth of India's living diversity and encourage them to get involved in a countrywide network of monitoring biodiversity. Furthermore, LlKEY/LlFDAT is designed as a participatory programme, which hopes to engage large numbers of people, taxonomists and software experts, teachers and naturalists, photographers and writers in further development of the resource material. 

LlKEY/LlFDAT currently has three components: (a) An interactive key for the identification of a set of species, (b) Illustrated descriptions of character states used in the key, (c) Illustrated species descriptions. It takes advantage of a computer's capability to employ a probabilistic algorithm using Bayesian inference so that when information is entered on a series of attributes of an organism, the programme generates a list of likely species in decreasing order of probability. This reduces the risk, ever present with the traditional branching keys, of being led down a wrong path with a single error. LlFKEY keys are based on a set of attributes with different character states chosen so as to be easily accessible, relatively constant and unambiguous. In case of birds, for instance, the attributes chosen include: whether the bird has long legs, long tail, prominent beak or a crest, its primary and secondary colours, its habitat and microhabitat, activity pattern, flocking habits and
 so on. It also uses the time of the year and geographical locality where the bird is observed to take advantage of the information on the patterns of seasonal migrations and geographical distributions of birds. In case of flowering plants the attributes chosen include habit, leaf arrangement, size of the leaf, leaf type, leaf margin, presence and nature of the bark, flower arrangement, flower size, flower colour, fruit shape and so on. For any given attribute, such as leaf shape, we do not ask the user to differentiate amongst the relatively large number of alternative states recognized by the botanists, but only amongst seven more simply defined character states, namely, 1.Linear, 2.Spearhead-shaped, 3.Elliptical, 4.Egg-shaped, 5.Heart-shaped, 6.Round, and 7.Lobed. The key is supported by descriptions and colour illustrations of the various alternative character states for all the attributes used in the key. This should help the user make an appropriate choice amongst the
 alternatives offered for the attribute under consideration. It is not essential that the user indicate a choice against all the attributes, the key can be operated with incomplete information. The initial version covers 100 species of birds and 262 species of flowering plants. 

 

The algorithm 

The key starts off with the assumption that there are certain prior probabilities of observing a particular species, for instance, of birds. The simplest assumption is that the probabilities are the same for all the species, so that with 100 species from amongst which to select, each species has an equal chance of 1/100 of being the one under consideration. One may adjust these, so that commoner species such as house crows are assigned higher prior probabilities. The probabilities are then modified whenever an observation as to some specific character state of the bird under consideration is recorded. Thus if the principal colour of the bird is recorded as black, the probability of the bird being a house crow or black drongo goes up, while that of its being a cattle egret or a roseringed parakeet goes down. 

LlFKEY includes detailed descriptions and several colour illustrations of all the species. Taking advantage of the multi-media facilities it also includes various calls of the bird species represented in the database. So the observer can examine the higher ranked choices offered and decide on the possible correct choice by studying the descriptions and images, and listening to calls. 

 

Free Software 

The current version employs Microsoft Access as the backend database with a Visual Basic front-end. LlFKEY and LlFDAT(mathay goler modhey capital R ditey hobey, bodhhoi copyrighter simbol) have been registered as Trademarks by the Indian Institute of Science and the software as well as the database have been copyrighted. The database includes contributions from a number of nature photographers and recordists of birdcalls. These contributors have been fully acknowledged and they continue to retain the copyrights over their own material. 

 

The intention is to offer both the software for the interactive key and the database for further development under GNU General Public License. The licenses for most software are designed to take away one's freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee everyone's freedom to share and change software - to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it.  

 

The work is on to develop a web-based version of LlFKEY and LlFDAT by employing an open source MYSQL database and PYTHON/ PHP front-end. It will soon be available in other Indian local languages. The aspiration is that as free software, both LlFKEY and LlFDAT would serve as the starting point of a process of continual improvement and development by an ever-growing group of collaborators. There are obviously manifold possibilities of further work, both in terms of the algorithm employed, the code and the database. The user interface can also be made much more attractive. Biologists and amateur naturalists can improve species descriptions, add data on new species and add images and calls. Users can select subsets of species appropriate for their own purpose. 

 

LlFKEY and LlFDAT awaits further development and constant upgradation but that's only possible once the acquired knowledge from the fieldwork will start coming in and these software find more users as well as collaborators and contributors.

 

 

 

*Excerpted from a note on the LIFEKEY/LIFEDAT Identification Keys prepared by the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore  

 



		
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