Introduction

The Edible Plants Database (EPD) is created for citizen scientists, by a fellow citizen scientist. Right now, it is a medium-sized list of plants listed by their common name. With your help, this database can become more extensive and usable for the everyday person.

Purpose/Idea

Its purpose is to decrease food waste. People may also find indirect applications to it too, like survival skills (like knowing what is edible can provide more food options and prevent illness by avoiding poisonous foods), but that is not the project's focus.

Instead, the main idea is to generate database of plants, along with their edible parts to eat and poisonous parts to avoid, to provide people with relevant information towards making conscientious food choices. If enough people utilize the EPD and other resources, then the outcome may lead to a food system that requires fewer resources overall to feed people. With the growing world population that we have currently, the EPD provides a solution to feed larger populations than now will little issue in the future.

To describe the process in more detail: if people discover plants and parts that are edible that they did not know about before, they may make the choice to eat it. When they do and hopefully continue the habit (if they choose to), then they will end up discarding less food. Then less food ends up in the landfill. Also, they may find food that may normally gets ignored (like weeds) and eat that instead of getting highly processed and packaged food. Then their food choices will require fewer resources to grow. Either way, This database is a resource to inspire people's food choices to trend towards being environmentally-friendly the more educated and proactive they become.

Even better, once the database is for the most part complete, a mobile application may be created to access its information without the internet. Then people will have portability and access to the EPD while in a location where they need to make food choices 'on-the-spot'. This feature will allow for greater opportunities for being proactive than just the database on the internet alone.

General Overview

This citizen science project will involve volunteers researching the internet for botany-related descriptors and typing them in (along with the link of where the descriptors were found) during each of the four phases:

• Phase 1: Plant Descriptions
• Phase 2: Verification of Phase 1
• Phase 3: Missing Plants
• Phase 4: Botanical Family Descriptions

Plants that have at least one edible part (even if it's through preparation, like cooking) get to make it into the database.

Food Waste

If people know what to eat that they normally do not eat, then less food ends up in the landfill. 40% of food is wasted, of which the EPD may reduce if more usable food is utilized. Reductions can occur at the household, where according to the article, hold about 1/4 of all the food waste, but may even extend to other levels too, like retail. For example, stores can increase the demand for underutilized food parts through advertising or informational documents, like brochures and magazines.

To find the links that will help with working on the project, view the 'Education' tab.