AskNature

ask Nature first to solve your broblem. Biomimicry approach

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Hunter's comment

This service is a volunteer-curated collection of Nature ideas.

The main idea of this service is to map your problems to Nature's solutions.
The main goal is to provide you a tool to do that.

And you'd say Yeah, cool. But why the heck should I care about Nature's opinion?
OK. There's at least one big reason. Nature is way way way more older (around 3.8 billion years) than you.
So Nature just has much more time to select the best solutions to a huge amount of problems.

There are several concepts you need to understand to use this service:

Functions;
Strategies;
Inspired Ideas;
Collections;

I won't provide you scientific definitions for all of these.
Let's take an example and discuss how we could save water. It's a Function.
Just type "save water" in the search box of this web-app and you'll get the Strategies (mechanisms) used by Nature to perform this function.
One of these is:

"Ice nucleation captures water. Lichens capture water via ice nucleation, absorbing the moisture once the temperature rises and the ice melts."
source

(Ice nucleation is creation of the centres of crystallization).

The next concept is Inspired Ideas. It's a collection of stories of ready products created with the help of the Nature.

And finally let's move on to the Collections concept. It's like a collection of themes for your browser. Collections mix Biological Strategies, Inspired Ideas and are formed based on a specific geographic area, human problem etc.

Also you can check the Resources (books, videos, training programs etc.) tab to learn about biomimicry.

If you've really got inspired by these concepts then you can join this initiative as a volunteer or a member.