Plant, Nature & Eco Karma Glossary — Belvoir Terms ExplainedGlossary.

Plain-language definitions of the ideas behind Belvoir and the wider movement to bring nature back into cities. Skim the list, or link straight to a term.

Eco karma

Eco karma is Belvoir's reward currency, earned for verifiable actions that benefit local biodiversity — such as identifying plants in green-deficient areas, adopting a plant to monitor, sharing observations, and joining community restoration projects. It unlocks sponsor-funded rewards and contributes to a public community-impact leaderboard.

Botanist coach

The botanist coach is Belvoir's AI care assistant. After you identify a plant, it provides care suggestions, plant lookup, and guidance on what the plant needs — turning identification into actionable stewardship rather than a dead-end name.

AI plant scanner

An AI plant scanner identifies a plant species from a phone photo using a machine-learning model, returning the most likely species along with a confidence score. Belvoir's scanner runs common species on-device and falls back to a server model for rare species.

Confidence score

A confidence score is the probability an identification app assigns to its top guess. A high score means a likely-correct match; a low score means you should check the alternative matches and verify against a second source before acting.

Citizen science

Citizen science is scientific research conducted partly or wholly by non-professionals. In nature apps, everyday users contribute observations — like plant sightings — that, in aggregate, become usable ecological data for researchers and conservationists.

Urban heat island

The urban heat island effect is the tendency of dense cities to be hotter and drier than surrounding areas, because concrete and asphalt absorb heat while a lack of vegetation removes natural cooling. Adding and maintaining greenery is the cheapest known mitigation.

Transpiration

Transpiration is the process by which plants release water vapor through their leaves. It raises local humidity and lowers ambient temperature in a plant's immediate radius — the mechanism behind vegetation's cooling effect in cities.

Collective impact radius

Collective impact radius is Belvoir's term for the idea that every cared-for plant has a small physical zone of benefit — cooler, more humid, more biodiverse. Individually negligible, these zones overlap into continuous coverage when a network of plants is maintained at scale.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the variety of living species in a given area. Higher urban biodiversity is linked to healthier ecosystems, better pollination, and greater resilience to environmental stress — and is the outcome Belvoir's community tools aim to measure and improve.

Interactive nature map

Belvoir's interactive nature map is a community observation network that shows where plants have been identified, adopted, and cared for. It makes neglected green spaces visible so the community can respond, and turns scattered observations into a shared picture of local environmental health.