The horticultural industry has long suffered from a lack of adequate informational resources to manage the identification and selection of the various species in cultivation. This proposal covers expansion of Aerulean's tools specifically for the benefit of the retail plant sales industry. The work includes: - database development to cover plants for sale, - refinements to and testing of Aerulean's plant selection tools aimed specifically at customers and staff of retail nurseries, - investigation of the retail plant sales supply chain and information flow to identify barriers that exist to business growth and ways in which Aerulean informational tools can eliminate these barriers. The primary focus will be on the business as practiced by retail nurseries which continue to have the largest market share with a goal of understanding why this market segment has been stagnating and how to rejuvenate it with better informational tools. We expect to create demand for more plant species from better-informed consumers, an interest in offering more plant species by retailers, and expanded opportunities for growers to provide more plant species. OBJECTIVES: 1. Develop database content for a selection of Zone 9 cultivated plants as carried by large retail nurseries, including horticultural, botanical, and image data. 2. Identify suppliers (growers) of these plants, or at least those which distribute in California. 3. Test the usability and utility of Aerulean selection and identification tools on these plants with several discrete user populations such as nursery staff and customers, experienced horticulturalists and average homeowners. 4. Investigate the economics of the retail plant business as currently practiced (again with an emphasis on California). Identify barriers to the sale of larger numbers of species and species from smaller specialty growers. 5. Determine where Aerulean plant selection and identification tools would be most valuable in modernizing the supply chain for the retail plant industry and how best to "tax" the supply chain so that (1) Aerulean can obtain revenue, (2) retailers and growers both benefit from improved business practices, increased revenue and reduced wastage, and (3) retailers and growers can see immediate benefit of any services or tools for which they are paying. APPROACH: The proposed work plan will extend the database of plants accessible with Aerulean tools to include roughly 2000 plants currently sold in retail nurseries for planting in the northern California portion of Zone 9. We will review the inventory listings from selected retailers plus botanical data and obtain new photographs. We will complete this compilation with the aid of our botanical and retail advisors and partners, particularly focusing on the overlap between published resources and wholesale inventories to document discrepancies that may exist between the published description of a plant and the plant being sold by the retailer. We will implement extensive selection criteria for all of these plants into an Aerulean selection tool and choose a subset for which we will develop easy-to-use identification keys taking advantage of Aerulean's apical trait cluster approach to identification. We will then carry out an extensive usability test plan including several discrete studies from vetting the horticultural information to testing the ability of novice plant customers to make sensible selections and correct identifications. These tests will be conducted according to standard usability test protocols. Refinements and corrections of the user interface and database will be implemented periodically as problems are identified. The value of our tools to various user populations will be assessed. Some users who have experience with existing tools will be asked to compare them to Aerulean tools. Test populations will include graduates of the San Mateo County Cooperative Extension Service Master Gardener program, members of the San Francisco Cactus and Succulent Society, as well as staff and customers of Wegman's Nursery in Redwood City, California. We will also continue a series of interviews we have been conducting with various retail nursery businessmen and plant wholesalers and growers to document the information flow that exists in various organizations at present. We will develop strategies for changing the way this process works (or doesn't work) by a combination of education and improved information flow. We expect to be able to dramatically improve the flow of supply and demand information between growers and retailers, as well as facilitate the ability of individual retailers to use more suppliers. We are aiming for a role in the retail plant business that can provide significant revenue to Aerulean in the long term. An important task is thus to identify revenue-making opportunities for Aerulean that can result from our facilitation of this revolution in the retail plant business. We will consider the relative merits of various approaches to selling or leasing our software tools, selling leads or advertising and taking commissions on generated sales (either by the grower, retailer or both). Our goal will be to develop a win-win-win-win situation for Aerulean, the growers, the retailers, and the end-users
