AI for Butterflies

In collaboration with Zooniverse and Microsoft’s AI for Earth, we are using artificial intelligence to extract wing traits from millions of digitized museum specimens. Wing size and color are important for thermoregulation, dispersal ability, and thus responses to land use and climate change. The integration of emerging technology with digitization of museum specimens around the world opens up new and exciting research questions.

Funding: There is no funding for this project but I’d be happy to co-develop fellowship or grant proposals.

Project status: We have several thousand digitized butterfly images with ruler and color cards which need to be measured and classified and then an AI/ML expert to train models for measuring wing color and wing size. This could make for a great summer internship project.

Time commitment: Variable. If you are an AI/ML expert interested in doing the analytical side, I can find a team of undergraduates to do the classification.