Abstract
Four of the twenty five diversity hotspots cover Southeast Asia: Sundaland, Philippines, Indo-Burma and Wallacea. All these hotspots gather a large number of endemic species and ecosystems, accounting for 20% of the world's plant, animal and marine species. A better knowledge of this diversity and distribution is thus essential to enable the implementation of adapted management and protection strategies. However, as human resources and expertise to achieve this are limited, it is therefore necessary to assess the interest of a citizen mobilisation that could multiply the capacities to record and analyze this biodiversity. As it is difficult for a non-specialist to quickly and correctly identify a large number of species, the development of new methods based on automatic visual approaches should facilitate and increase citizen participation. Recent research results have shown a significant improvement in the field, however, the evaluation of such an approach to monitor flora or fauna on a large scale, in the context of high endemism, has never been done. We report here an experiment implemented at the scale of the flora of the Peninsular Malaysia, based on the Pl@ntNet citizen science platform. This study highlights the interest of Malaysian society in this type of approach, and lays the groundwork to facilitate the deployment of similar methodology in other Asian countries.