October 10-13 marked the 15th time Notes from Nature has participated in WeDigBio. The, now twice a year, event is great time to learn more about what the natural history museum community is doing by participating in a symposium, interacting with volunteers and generally supporting our data providers with expeditions and special events.

For the October 2024 event, Notes from Nature recorded over 21,700 classifications. We are so honored and appreciative of all the support. There is still lots of expeditions to work on, so please stop by anytime and help us spread the word!

Stay tuned for the the exact dates of the next WeDigBio which will take place in April 2025.

— The Notes from Nature team

Many thanks to all that have been participating in WeDigBio. We are in awe of your contributions! Over 12,600 classifications have been recorded so far. Capture the Collections had another huge day with over 2,300 classifications. We are also very excited to see all the interest in our newest project Ranges Mammal Traits from western North America .

We are excited to see what Day 3 brings.

With gratitude,

– The Notes from Nature Team

It was a fun and exciting first day of WeDigBio. In total Notes from Nature received over 7,000 classifications! We so appreciated everyone that contributed.

Our symposium titled How is AI Being Used in Biodiversity Efforts? was very well attended with over 100 registered participants. Many thanks to the organizers and speakers.

Please visit Notes from Nature today and help us spread the word about this important event.

— The Notes from Nature team

We wanted to remind you that WeDigBio starts in one week on October 10th and continues through October 13. WeDigBio or Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections, is a global data campaign, virtual science festival, and local outreach opportunity, all rolled into one. The annual, 4-day WeDigBio events mobilize participants to create digital data about biodiversity specimens. You can learn more at https://wedigbio.org/

Notes from Nature will be hosting lots of expeditions that you can work on from anywhere. Just head over to Notes from Nature select a project of interest and then choose one of the expeditions to work on. Every record you enter makes a huge difference!

Lastly, please see out previous post about a special WeDigBio symposium being held on October 10th at 2pm central

Thanks,

The Notes from Nature Team

How is AI Being Used in Biodiversity Efforts?

The WeDigBio board is pleased to announce a one-hour symposium, “How is AI Being Used in Biodiversity Efforts? on October 10 from 2-3pm Central Time (3-4pm Eastern Time). This session will include three different examples of how AI can be used in service of digitization and conservation efforts, and how its use is being monitored. As the presence of AI in all walks of life becomes more common, the use of AI (both the why and the how) is not always clear. In this session, three researchers will share how they use AI in their work, why it is useful for them, and the methods they have in place to ensure data quality.

Schedule

2:00–2:05 Welcome! by Samantha Blickhan (Zooniverse)

2:05–2:20 The evolution of AI as a tool for conservation, by Sarah Huebner (Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute)

2:20–2:35 Phenobase: a central global database of plant phenology by integrating in situ observatory and image-derived phenology data, by Daijiang Li (University of Arizona)

2:35–2:50 Leveraging ground truth Smithsonian data to evaluate AI tools (Smithsonian OCIO Data Science Lab and Office of Digital Transformation)

2:50–3:00 Panel Discussion

The 4-day WeDigBio event runs from October 10-13. WeDigBio stands for Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections. To learn more about WeDigBio, visit wedigbio.org.

Register to get a Zoom link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-is-ai-being-used-in-biodiversity-efforts-tickets-1033701638427

We are looking forward to the next WeDigBio, which is less than 3 weeks away! The event takes place April 18-21, 2024. There is still time to get involved, so please reach out if you are interested or have any questions at all about the event.

If you are interested in hosting an event, please check out https://wedigbio.org/content/register-event-tour-or-campaign.

The WeDigBio symposium for this event will focus on Artificial Intelligence. More details to come soon.

Looking forward to it,

The Notes from Nature Team

California’s deserts are far from wastelands, but bursting with biodiversity and plant life. Each of California’s desert habitats, the Mojave, Colorado and Great Basin deserts each have their own distinct landscapes and ecology. The Mojave is a high desert with winter snowfall and low overall rainfall, while in contrast the colorado desert is a low desert with monsoon-like seasonal rains. The Great Basin desert begins in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California and spans across much of Nevada and Utah. The great basin has even higher altitude conditions than the mojave and is subdivided by several ranges of mountains. Each of the desert habitats is home to thousands of plant species with hundreds of unique species that are endemic to California. While this expedition will only contain a selection of the wide breadth of flowering desert plants native in California, we hope you enjoy it and learn something new.

Please give it a try https://bit.ly/4cBICKK!

Here is a highlight of some interesting desert-dwelling plant species that you can find in this expedition:
Eramalche Rotundifolia also known as the desert five spot is native to the Mojave , Colorado and Great Basin deserts of California and neighboring states. It is a special sight in Death Valley National Park or Anza Borrego Desert State Park during the spring blooms.

Chylismia Munzii or the Death Valley Suncup is native to California and Nevada, and can also be found in its name-sake national park Death Valley. Chylismia Munzii is in Onagraceae or the evening primrose family.

Larrea tridentata commonly known as the creosote bush or La Gobernadora in Mexico, is widespread across the Mojave, Colorado in the United States and the Chihuahuan desert in Mexico. This hardy plant can go up to two years without water. Larrea tridentata has a long lifespan and the interesting ability to clone itself asexually. Single individuals can be found to live up to 500 years with clonal colonies ( colonies of genetically identical clones from a single ancestor) able to live up to 11,000 years. You can read more about Larrea tridentata at nps.gov here.

Plants of the Mojave, Colorado and Great Basin deserts: https://bit.ly/4cBICKK!

Have you ever wondered why bugs are the colors they are? From the bright hues of butterflies to the earthy tones of ants, these natural colors serve many important roles. These roles include attracting mates, warding off predators, and staying warm.

In dragonflies, a 300-million-year-old group intimately connected to freshwater ecosystems on Earth, the uses of their vibrant body colors are almost entirely unknown. This is because of an unfortunate problem – color fade. We would normally turn to specimens in museum collections for data on the colors of species, but because their pigments naturally degrade over time their vivid colors disappear in weeks to months. 

For this reason we turn to iNaturalist, a citizen science platform where users upload photo observations of organisms. Since it contains photos of live organisms, color fade is no issue. But it also presents many challenges because of how incredibly variable these images can be. Think of all the different viewing angles, lighting conditions, and cameras that many thousands of observers use across the 2 million dragonfly images on iNaturalist. All of these affect the color we see.

We have developed an approach that uses computer vision and AI to deal with these issues. We are able to pull the dragonfly out of each image, filter bad or weird ones out, then discover what colors are present. This data will allow us to finally answer questions about the colors of the 2000 dragonfly species on iNaturalist globally. For example we think that dark body colors might be used to help warm dragonflies in cold environments, and that vibrant patterns are used for species recognition during mating.

An essential part of trying a new method in science is you make sure it works. Our approach to getting color data is really complex and novel, and we want to compare it to the common standard of having human observers code colors – and for that we need your help! If the colors you choose for an image match up to what our computational approach detects for that same image, we’re golden. Otherwise, I have more work to do! 

Thanks for considering joining the Big Dragonfly Color team!

Link to our expedition:

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/md68135/notes-from-nature-labs

Be sure to choose “Big Dragonfly Color” on the right side of the page!

The Notes from Nature team is thrilled to announce the launch of a new project called CAS Plants to Pixels! We currently have two live expeditions and a demo that shows off some of the capabilities that we’ll be using for the project in the future. Please give them a try and let us know what you think.

The main goal of this project is to digitize California collected herbarium specimens housed at the California Academy of Sciences. You can learn more about the exciting high throughput method being used for imaging and the resulting research involved in this project on the project Research page.

We’ve got a lot more to share in the coming weeks and months. You can get involved now by give the project a try — visit: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/md68135/notes-from-nature-cas-plants-to-pixels

Happy Earth Day. This is a very special day at Notes from Nature as it’s our 11th anniversary! We first launched Notes from Nature on Earth Day 2013 and we are beyond grateful to still be here today.

We are so thankful for all the support of our colleagues, the National Science Foundation and most of all our volunteers! Whether you stopped by once or have been with us for years, we literally won’t be here without you and your support. Thank you.

We just wrapped another amazing WeDigBio. Notes from Nature received over 14,000 classifications during the event. Thank you to all the event organizers, symposium and presenters. Note that the next WeDigBio event is scheduled for October 10 – 13 2024. 

As always there is more work to be done, so please stop by Notes from Nature when you can and help us spread the word.

– The Notes from Nature Team