KEYtoNATURE - Interactive guides to biodiversity

Project Dryades (Dept. of Life Sciences, University of Trieste) has created more than 600 interactive guides to plants, animals and fungi available online. For some of them stand-alone applications for mobile tools were also developed, but these tend to have a rather ephemeral life, since they do dot always work after updates of the operating systems. For this reason, we have created 'KEYtoNATURE', a player that allows you to download on a mobile device any identification key produced by Project Dryades, transforming it into a stand-alone application. You only have to connect your device online, choose one of the guides from the archive (using, if needed, the 'language' filter, or searching by keywords), and press the download button, after which the app will work without an internet connection. The download time depends on the number of species included in a guide, tending to decrease with the number of downloaded guides. The download of the first guide may take several minutes. The first version of 'KEYtoNATURE' offers 100 guides, large and small, to vascular plants. In the course of 2015 more guides will be added, dedicated to lichens, algae, butterflies, fishes, and other organisms.