InfraShare Mobile: Crowdsourcing Plant Health Using Near-Infrared Photography

Abstract

As trees and other vegetation are crucial in regulating and maintaining our ecosystem, monitoring their health is an important task. This job often falls to those who work for environmentrelated institutions; however this does not have to be the case. Many organizations have begun to use crowdsourcing and volunteer recruitment to help collect environmental data, which allows for ecosystem monitoring to be increasingly efficient. This thesis introduces InfraShare Mobile, an open source mobile application framework that provides a simple, easy process for plant health data to be obtained and analyzed. It allows anyone to use commercial-off-the-shelf devices, including webcams and digital cameras, to take near-infrared photos of vegetation and then analyze these photos on their mobile devices. These photos are then uploaded to a companion web application where they can be viewed along with their location and other information. After using three different cameras to evaluate InfraShare Mobile, it is clear that the application allows for detailed data on plant health to be collected on a wide scale, low cost basis, and that it will allow environmentalists to have access to more information about the current state of the natural environment.