Smartphone conservation

The world is losing biodiversity, biomass and soil carbon, and other ecosystem services at alarming rates. We need your help to safeguard rare and threatened plants from extinction.

NatureMap-plants is a project, established within the Nature Map Earth Initiative, that aims to improve our knowledge of flowering plant species distribution and ecology in Indonesia, India, Ethiopia and Turkey. These four countries are extremely rich in plant species but we lack data that can tell us where species are located and where endemic or threatened plants need protecting.

If you have a smartphone, or camera, we want you to take photos of wild flowering plants (not planted by humans) and post them onto iNaturalist, a crowdsourcing platform and online community, along with the date and location. These plants will be identified by experts and the data used by our researchers at Kew and partner institutions.

Your images could identify a new or endangered species and will contribute to their future survival.

To get involved, visit the NatureMap-plants project page on iNaturalist.