GeoPl@ntNet
GeoPl@ntNet is an interactive web application designed to make Essential Biodiversity Variables accessible and understandable to all through dynamic maps and fact sheets. Its core purpose is to allow users to explore high-resolution, AI-generated maps of plant species distribution and biodiversity indicators across Europe. These maps, developed as part of the work package 3, provide an intuitive yet information-rich interface to better understand plant biodiversity in specific regions. The platform is available to authorized users via a designated URL.
The application offers several key features. Users can visualize detailed distribution maps of plant species or EUNIS habitats at various scales across Europe, with resolutions as precise as 50×50 meters. It also enables exploration of biodiversity in specific regions, allowing users to select areas of interest on the map, such as urban green spaces, protected areas, or riverbanks, to view local species and their coverage. Additionally, GeoPl@ntNet generates comprehensive reports for selected regions, including insights into the number of protected species, invasive species posing risks to ecosystems, and endemic species requiring targeted conservation efforts.
The user can explore a selection of maps on a European scale at 50x50m resolution: Tree species richness, EUNIS habitats level 1, EUNIS habitats level 2, and species prediction. Once users select a case study or country, they can explore various biodiversity data, including species prediction maps, habitat prediction maps, and biodiversity indicators. These maps provide detailed visualizations such as the estimated number of species, species presence probability, species occurrence data from sources like GBIF or the European Vegetation Archive for comparison, and habitat presence probability.
Given the potentially extensive lists of species and habitats, tools are available to help users quickly locate relevant data. Species can be sorted by coverage, name, family, or genus, while habitats can be organized by coverage, name, level, or code.
Basic Technologies Used
This web application front-end is developed as a Single Page Application with the VueJS framework. It uses the popular Leaflet library to display maps. The user interface of GeoPl@ntNet has two main components; a map on the right and a sidebar on the left with 3 tabs (indicators, species, and habitats) to control what is displayed on the map.
All the maps in the GeoPl@ntNet application are available as WMS streams, the standard communication protocol of the Open GeoSpatial Consortium. They can, therefore, be easily integrated into any other cartographic tool.
A web service allowing to get the report of a particular Area of Interest in JSON format has also been developed and is available via my.plantnet.org (for authorised accounts).
The map server is currently hosted on CIRAD’s virtual private network (which hosts most of the Pl@ntNet infrastructure servers). Given the fact that the amount of data to be stored is huge (several TB), we use an NFS (Network File System) mounting point on a Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) provided by Meso@LR (a French regional computing and data skills centre offering shared resources and cutting-edge High-Performance Computing (HPC) and High Throughput Computing (HTC architectures). We use the same SVM to store cached raster tiles provided by the MapProxy cache server and COGs used by TiTiler.
Usefulness in GUARDEN Case Studies
As a web application available at EU scale, GeoPl@ntNet is relevant for all case studies of GUARDEN since it covers all their geographic extent. In addition, specific views for each of the four case studies have also been developed to make it easier to view the maps restricted to the case study areas.
The exploration of species and indicator distributions at the scale of the spatial areas covered by the case studies facilitated exchanges with local experts in the field, providing feedback on the potential limitations of the work carried out or the need for clarification of the methodology used for the analysis of some indicators (such as, for example, the indicator of the number of invasive species in an area, given that the ‘invasive species’ status is not the same for a given species from one region to another). This work also enabled us to contribute to the dialogues undertaken as part of the project’s focus groups (WP2), and to participate in the estimation of ecosystem services (WP3) in the regions studied.
Contact Information
- Rémi Palard (Cirad)
- remi.palard@cirad.fr