Fig. 1: Concept of MCSE.
From: Urbanization signatures on climate and soils uncovered by crowd-sensed plants
a, Bioindication assigns species-specific indicator values for climate (temperature, light and moisture) and soil (nutrients, salinity, reaction and disturbance) conditions. Environmental gradients are reflected by a changing mean indicator value of the occurring species, illustrated for temperature. b, Mobile crowd sensing utilizes extensive acquisitions of species occurrences by citizens using automated plant identification apps for smartphones. Combined with the bioindication principle, spatial environmental gradients can be uncovered, for example, for temperature showing warmer conditions in cities compared with nearby mountain ranges. c, Large amounts of indicator plant occurrences are accumulating rapidly over large spatial domains, such as Europe. d–f, This allowed for mapping environmental conditions across Europe at a spatial resolution of 0.166∘ (~10 km), and at much finer resolution (0.00166∘, ~100 m) for cities due to higher observation densities. Please note that the color scales for Europe (left) and cities (right) differ. Extended Data Fig. 1 shows complementary figures for light, moisture, nutrients and salinity.
