Educational or emotional languages? An interactive experiment with the Lucanian flora (S-Italy)

In the frame of dissemination activities for a still-in-progress work on the Sites of Community Importance (see EU Directive 92/43) of Basilicata (a region of Southern Italy), an interactive tool (IIT) for the identification of vascular plants growing there has been illustrated to two groups of people, following two different approaches: one focused on textual parts and on scientific accuracy, the other on images and on the visual comparison of different objects. The reactions were measured in terms of number of accesses to the IIT, elapsed time from the demonstration to the first individual access, and number of queries in the first week after the IIT was distributed. The most clicked options were recorded as well. People who followed the emotional/visual approach proved to be significantly more interested in the IIT than those who followed the descriptive/scientific approach. It seems that to raise the interest of non-experts to the identification of plant species and, more in general, to the study of biodiversity, words should be kept at minimum, while the quality of the images and their "appeal" are essential.