A New Method for Counting Reproductive Structures in Digitized Herbarium Specimens Using Mask R-CNN.

ABSTRACT: Phenology-the timing of life-history events-is a key trait for understanding responses of organisms to climate. The digitization and online mobilization of herbarium specimens is rapidly advancing our understanding of plant phenological response to climate and climatic change. The current practice of manually harvesting data from individual specimens, however, greatly restricts our ability to scale-up data collection. Recent investigations have demonstrated that machine-learning approaches can facilitate this effort. However, present attempts have focused largely on simplistic binary coding of reproductive phenology (e.g., presence/absence of flowers). Here, we use crowd-sourced phenological data of buds, flowers, and fruits from >3,000 specimens of six common wildflower species of the eas

SUBMITTER: Davis CC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7411132 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature