The greenhouse.Flority System was created to empower communities to increase transparency of Nature Based Landscape Restoration Projects in rural Africa.

Guiding Principles

Empowering: A feature set fully adjustable to the experience of each individual user allows anybody to collect ground truth data.
Accurate: Geospatial Error can be adjusted on systems level resulting in reliable data.
Flexible: Collect anything anywhere through custom forms and full offline functionality.
Ownership: Review, edit, hide, delete, share and download your data with customizable user privileges.
Transparent: One Account for Flority Field Data Collection and greenhouse. allow each individual user to keep track off their recordings.

Main Features of Flority

Highly accurate GPS-Photos with an enforced custom accuracy setting (remote configuration).
GPS-Polygon recording with each vertice accuracy being recorded as well.
App configuration is fully remote and configuration refreshes after app relaunch or any uploads.
Flexible and fully customizable user hierarchy with custom privileges, forms etc. (remote configuration).
In App Gallery Option to review, delete and edit content.
Custom Geo-Accuracy Setting (remote configuration).
Automatic Data Upload.
Full Offline Compatibility.
Adjustable Image Quality (remote configuration).
Private Copy of images into standard phone Gallery.
Custom sets of #tags (remote configuration).
Custom set of forms with mandatory and optional fields (remote configuration).

Please note that your version might differ in feature set due to the nature of the remote configuration

Installation

On your Android phone, scan this QR code or open https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wellsforzoe.eyes&gl=DE and download, install and Open Flority.

It will prompt several warning messages. Always select the red circled answer

Helpful Image

Updating the App

To ensure a smooth App update procedure usually a warning will show that in e.g. 7 days an update will be required to keep uploading data to greenhouse.

Should one not be able to update the App (e.g. when offline in the field), then it will still be possible to capture photos and data in the field but upload will be deactivated and this warning message will appear:

Once back in an area with network please simply install the new version without removing the current version. All your data will not be lost during this process and after updating you will be able to upload previously captured data to greenhouse.

Compatibility

Flority App currently is only compatible with Android devices

Log in and User Account

The User Account for greenhouse. and Flority is identical as it is technically one single User Account used on both the web-Interface greenhouse. and the mobile App Flority. As soon as your Administrator invites you to the platform you are required to change your password. Please note that simple passwords like ABC12345 will not work and special case, number and capital and small letters must be used. Enter your Username and Password (both are case sensitive)

I don't have a User Account

If you do not have an account or your account details are wrong you should contact your respective Administrator/Superior who can create an account for you if your organization is already registered in the system. If not reach out to info@flority.app. Even if you should not have an account you still have the option to use the app in the most basic variant to capture accurate GPS-Photos which are saved in your phone gallery (any sort of automatic upload to greenhouse. will not be available in this mode, as well as any custom forms which actually make the App powerful). Should you get logged out occasionally please contact info@flority.app as this is not supposed to happen.

General Information on Collection Logic

Flority data collection is centred around the capture of highly accurate geotagged photos and associated attributes. Therefore, the camera module will only display an image and allow data capture if the geospatial accuracy is below the systems-wide set threshold (e.g. less than 15m). While it may be annoying at times to have to wait few seconds to capture a photo it is the only way to ensure that captured data will be consistent between thousands of users.

Custom forms allow the collection of any additional attributes, comments and surveys if desired. These are usually directly associated and therefore attached to a previously captured GPS-Photo. These forms are co-created by the project administration and the greenhouse.Flority team.

Flority is supposed to be used in the field to collect actual tamper proof ground truth data. It will not allow to geotag or upload any previously captured images from your phone Gallery by design.

Remote Configuration

Flority App currently has no settings that can be customized in App by the user. This is by design to keep complexity minimal for the end user in the field but give the Project Administrator maximum flexibility while deploying hundreds of citizen science ground truth data collectors. It is technically possible to adjust each and any setting for each user or user group and the following settings can be adjusted.

Image Quality and Resolution
Minimum required geospatial accuracy (e.g. 5m, 10m, 15m, 25m, ...)
available tags
available forms
available Custom Menu Options
daily upload limits
remote App deactivation

Geospatial Accuracy

If your device does not yet have the required geopositional accuracy (which is defined by the Project or Organization Administrator) a warning message will appear. Should this message show up in the field for several minutes repeatedly please reach out to your project administrator and let us know which device and user name you are using as we could then decrease the accuracy threshold required. Android offers a minimum setting of 5m.

Training Mode (optionally available)

A special Training Mode can be activated and it is - as the name suggests - only meant for purely Training data.

IMPORTANT: TRAINING DATA WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE DELETED FROM THE SYSTEM AFTER 14 DAYS.

We know that people like the system so much that they demonstrate it to others all the time and suddenly random snapshots appear in the system. Please remind users to use training mode in these cases. It will always deactivate automatically after going back to the Main Overview Page to not use it accidentally.

Photo storage

Flority App creates two identical copies of each photo captured: One copy is stored in your regular phone gallery and you have full access to it, the other copy is hidden for the user in an inaccessible location and can not be manually deleted. This is necessary to ensure that submitted photos are always original and unaltered.

Automatic Upload

Automatic Upload = ON

During Field Data Collection the setting: Automatic Upload = ON automatically uploads all data captured should cellular data network be available. This can be useful for bulk-shooting of planting proof (e.g. seedlings planted along a road) and it helps to activate this feature to very inexperienced users to make sure that their field data will be successfully submitted. Should network fail then it will automatically retry.

WARNING: Should you capture a private or sensitive photo by accident then Automatic Upload will push that to the server immediately nevertheless, so please be mindful of data privacy. Should you need to delete a photo from the greenhouse. system it is possible and described in the greenhouse tutorial.

WARNING: If a user captures a photo and uploads it immediately then Administrators can instantly derive the actual live geolocation of the person and might be able to track you in real time.

There are several reasons why it can be helpful to deactivate Automatic Upload:

Automatic Upload = OFF

Deactivating the Automatic Upload can have the following benefits:

You do not want your Project Administrators to be able to track your live location? Just upload all photos from the field at once in the evening when in a safe place.
A free Wifi network is available at the end of the field data recording activity and cellular data costs can thereby be saved by deactivating Automatic Upload
Your phone battery is weak or has a low charge? Deactivating Auto Upload will save battery as no data will be shared via the App.
With automatic upload it is not possible to review, delete or edit your photos before they are uploaded. Deactivating Automatic Upload gives you access to Gallery Functions.

Deactivating the Automatic Upload however bears the risk that inexperienced users simply forget to submit photos over a long period of time.

However it allows (optional setting) to access the internal Flority Gallery Functionality where photos can be reviewed, deleted, tags be edited and forms answered. Any data captured will accumulate on your phone and not be deleted from the internal Flority storage, so if you were to never upload photos but keep capturing photos your storage might eventually run low.

GPS-Photos

GPS-Photos are photos with a geolocation tag. While many camera apps can record a geolocation tag, Flority will only allow the user to capture a geotagged photo within a certain accuracy threshold, e.g. 10m.

The camera will be deactivated to avoid having GPS-Photos showing up at the wrong location with an error of hundreds of meters if not kilometers which is actually one of the reasons the App was invented.

Documenting work in a daily photostream

Flority can be used to document daily work in a nursery, at site preparation as well as documenting any planting acitivities and #tags can be set in camera during the capture of a photo so that different activities can be easily categorized and separated on the map in greenhouse.

Being able to gather hundreds of photos dispersed throughout a landscape gives a clear indication where work is happening and it can improve the project significantly if images are analyzed by experienced ecologists.

If one has individual geotagged sample images of trees planted it can help to determine how accurately GPS-Polygons are delinated or if accidentally an area has been missed or left out by accident. Knowing where Landscape Restoration work is happening is of course the first step in a tedious analysis of the impact on landscape and community. Following is an example where one can see an area being left out in the polygon allowing a drone map to be expanded above this area, field staff to be sent back to re-record the polygon.

Another example perfectly illustrates the usefulness of the high accuracy of the geotagged GPS-Photos: Trees have been planted along a road in an alley style. One blue dot indicating the positions of the GPS-Photos however is directly next to a building... hovering over the images at the bottom it can be seen that it is a preschool and therefore all photos are within reasonable accuracy limits to become useful datapoints.

GPS-Polygons

Classic Mode

GPS-Polygons are recorded by walking around the area of interest (e.g. restoration site) and taking GPS-Photos, ideally looking inwards, at bends to demarcate the area. Depending on boundary-complexity of the site, less or more photos are sufficient during this process (see example)

As the App can not know when Polygonrecording is finished, the very last step is to select the #polygon-end Option and capture one final photo.

This triggers to open a form to add additional attributes, in the custom Form for TerraFund for AFR100, the following additional attributes can be added with some marked mandatory.

Info:

If one should have to pause recording due to unforeseen weather events or low battery it is possible to revisit the site within 48 hours and continue the polygon recording and finish it with #polgyon-end as if there had not been a break in between.
Should the surveyor forget to finish the polygonrecording with a final photo with #polygon-end the system will try to autoclose the polygon and send an alert to the surveyor (if an Email is registered with the user) as well as with their respective Project Administrator.

GPS-Centerpoints for TerraFund for AFR100 Monitoring

GPS-Centerpoints can be used to mark the center of a Dispersed Landscape Restoration Plot, e.g. if a farmer plants trees on less than 3ha one would go to the center of his activities, usually his farm and mark that area with a GPS-centerpoint. To do this, select the GPS-Centerpoint option, decide if this is the right option after reading the info popup, then capture a GPS-Photo and fill out the attached form with the additioNally requested attributes and click on Upload.

Gallery Functionality (optional)

The Gallery within Flority App is only available if Automatic Upload = OFF. Images can be viewn near full screen by touching the double headed arrow for a brief moment.

Review and Delete Images

Multiple images can be selected and deleted. This function can help inexperienced users to remove seemingly identical duplicates to avoid clogging the system with multiple near-identical datapoints. Deleting near-identical duplicates, blurry, incomplete or unwanted photos will save data on user-side and is thereby highly recommended.

Tag Images

Should a user accidentally have used the wrong tag then it is possible on page two of the Flority Gallery to select multiple images to change their tag.

Edit Forms

Should a comment or a form be associated and attached to an image then the form details can be altered at a later stage should the Automatic Upload be off. This can be helpful in the following scenarios:

Some form answers can not be given at the specific moment maybe due to a local expert not being on site
In bad weather conditions it can be helpful to postpone tedious comment writing to a place where there is no rain/wind or strong sunshine

There are two different icons for Forms:

Optional = White Icon If all form answers are optional then the Form Icon is white and information can be given but also an image itself could be submitted without any additional attributes given.
Mandatory = Red Icon If at least one form answer is mandatory then the form icon is red and Information must be entered before the corresponding image or Polygon can be uploaded or be submitted for upload.

Confirm and Upload

Last step in the Gallery mode is to confirm the current selection and to confirm for Upload.

Forms

A form is usually co-designed by the Superior Project Developer and highly standardized to fit the criteria the project documentation protocol requires. Forms can include additional Options to add GPS-Photos (e.g. for Accounting Documentation it is possible and actually feasible to use Flority) as well as any sort of usual Form Options be it Multiple Choice, Numbers or written answers. Following are some examples to give a rough overview of possibilities.

Simple comment
Select a date and/or time
Add additional GPS-Photos within the form
Note measurements (e.g. tree diameter DBH)
Species names and numbers planted
Socioeconomic survey data

greenhouse. A powerful tool for Landscape Restoration.

Having used various tools to view tens of thousands of GPS-Photos as datapoints (e.g. Google Earth Pro, our custom map ( https://maps.wellsforzoe.org/?zoom=7&lat=-13.3&lng=34 ) the process of importing data in near real-time was always frustrating and cumbersome. If you capture and upload a GPS-Photo with Flority App it instantly shows up in the Gallery as well as a dot on the map. Thousands of users can now capture field data to contribute to increase the transparency of Landscape Restoration Projects based on Natural Solutions.

It is accessible using the same Login Information as with Flority App so each user has full control and insight into their captured data. It is not optimized for phone so when using on a phone it is highly recommended to enable Desktop Mode. There will be some improvements over time but it is intended to be used on Desktop as of now.

GPS-Photos

All photos captured with Flority App are directly uploaded to greenhouse and are displayed in the Gallery and Map.

If you double click on an image in the GPS-Photos Tab then the respective image will be displayed enlarged with the respective Attributes (more attributes to be displayed soon) - capture date, time, user as well as the respective #tag.

Using the right and left arrow key you can display the previous or next photo. Should you want to download individual images then simply right click and Select "Save Image as..." The full geotag will remain embedded with the file. This will however only download a reduced size. To view and download the full size you can doubleclick on it and then download the displayed image (or do a right click and select to Open in New Tab and download it from there).

If a user uploads new photos the info will be displayed on top of the thumbnails with a Refresh button.

Highlight GPS-Photos to select them

As not each photo is worth sharing on other platforms (e.g. TerraMatch) it can help to highlight the photos actually worth sharing. Please note that only highlighted photos will be selected when sharing data with geofences. Highlighting a photo can be done in all pages where photos are visible in greenhouse.

The same thing applies to GPS-Photos in the Gallery:

Private GPS-Photos

You want to keep your photos private - while still being able to share it with platforms supporting this mode (e.g. TerraMatch)?

If a photo was captured in private mode in Flority it will automatically show up as private in greenhouse and you will see the icon change. If you want to disable the private mode you can do so by clicking on the icon.

Please note: If a photo is marked as private it can still be shared (if simultaenously highlighted) with supporting platforms (e.g. TerraMatch), and it will retain its private tag there as well.

Public photo:

Private photo:

As it can be cumbersome to share your data on other platforms we allow for the creation of a geofence that can then allow the sharing (or at a later stage to download) the geodata of a certain timeframe in a certain area by specific users.

Click this button to create a geofence and follow the instructions.

Make sure to give the geofence a meaningful name, e.g. the corresponding site name in the connected platform (e.g. TerraMatch)

To share data using the geofence:

Select the timeframe that contains the data you want to share
Make sure to highlight (or toggle private) the photos you want to share (private photos can be shared while remaining the attribute and staying private on the connected platform)
Select the items you want to share - select a site to push the data to and hit Export (here: on TerraMatch)

The map module is designed for the bulk visualization of tens of thousands of datapoints. There are two main different options to display data:

Heatmap: the more intense the colour, the more datapoints are in the respective area.

Cluster: more contemporary view but less intuitive

Blue dots represent the position where a GPS-Photo has been taken. To be able to quickly assess which kind of activity is represented, the thumbnails at the bottom are a random subsection of images.

If you hover over an image a larger dot indicates in which area of the map the image is located.

You can click on a thumbnail to view a larger image as well as additional metadata. This is the case for GPS-Photos, as well as for GPS-Polygons.

Polygons can be modified after a field recording by an eligible user (it is possible to forbid this to stop unwanted modification after a recording). There are numerous reasons why someone might want to modify the outline of a boundary:

Maybe two adjacent polygons have a slight overlap
An area that should not be included (grassland, road, lake, ...) was included by accident during the field recording
A section of a site was inaccessible due to fire, flood, vegetation or steep terrain.

To edit the shape of the polygon select Edit and move the vertices (red circles) around. You can add or delete points by clicking on the small yellow points in between vertices. To delete a vertice, select it and click on the trash icon.

To keep track of which data has been recorded in the field and which modifications have been made to a polygon after the recording process, we have introduced a history funtionality which indicates where the original outline of a polygon was.

If a GPS-photo, GPS-Polygon or a GPS-Centerpoint is deleted in greenhouse will it be automatically deleted in connected platforms (e.g. TerraMatch)?

--> No, nothing happens.
If any data is deleted in connected platforms (e.g. TerraMatch) that has been pushed via greenhouse., will this data be deleted in greenhouse.?

--> No, nothing happens.
If the geometry of a GPS-Polygon is updated in greenhouse after it has already been pushed to a connected platform (e.g. TerraMatch) - what happens?

--> Nothing happens, unless the GPS-Polygon gets pushed to the respective connected platform again.
If a geometry of a GPS-Polygon is updated in a connected platform (e.g. TerraMatch) that has originally been pushed to this platform from greenhouse, what happens?

--> It is marked in greenhouse. as updated and it is from then on impossible to push it to the connected platform again in order not to create unwanted changes.
If the geometry of a GPS-Polygon was updated and then pushed again to a site on the connected platform, what happens?

--> The existing polygon at the connected platform (e.g. TerraMatch) will be updated

Flority & greenhouse. Documentation