Abstrakt
The Pladias portal (available on https://pladias.cz) was developed in 2014-2018 to summarize the critically revised information about Czech flora and vegetation and make it available to the public, including educators. The portal takes over data from the Pladias database, a tool used by professional botanists.
The portal contains two main domains of content, focused on: (i) species - providing information on their occurrence, photographs, and more than one hundred biological and ecological characteristics, and (ii) vegetation - providing information on vegetation types such as distribution maps, photographs and textual descriptions hyperlinked with the species domain. Both domains offer multiple opportunities for school instruction, but here we want to highlight the online matrix-based species identification key, which is a part of this portal.
This key is using not only morphological traits but also ecological information on species, which makes it an extraordinary opportunity for hands-on school activities during botany instruction, enhancing it with the digital dimension.