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Citizen Science Projects Have a Surprising New Partner – The Computer

Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘Identifying animal species in camera trap images using deep learning and citizen science‘ taken from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

The computer’s accuracy rates for identifying specific species, like this warthog, are between 88.7 percent and 92.7 percent. Image credit: ©Panthera
The computer’s accuracy rates for identifying specific species, like this warthog, are between 88.7 percent and 92.7 percent. ©Panthera

For more than a decade, citizen science projects have helped researchers use the power of thousands of volunteers who help sort through datasets that are too large for a small research team. Previously, this data generally couldn’t be processed by computers because the work required skills that only humans could accomplish.

Now, computer machine learning techniques that teach the computer specific image recognition skills can be used in crowdsourcing projects to deal with massively increasing amounts of data—making computers a surprising new partner in citizen science projects.

Continue reading “Citizen Science Projects Have a Surprising New Partner – The Computer”

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Meetings, Methods papers, Online extras

An Interview with Alan Gelfand

David Warton interviews Alan Gelfand, a keynote speaker at the Statistics in Ecology and Environmental Monitoring (SEEM) conference in Queenstown, NZ. Alan is best known for proposing Bayesian estimation of a posterior distribution using Gibbs sampling, in his classic papers ‘Sampling-Based Approaches to Calculating Marginal Densities‘ and ‘Illustration of Bayesian Inference in Normal Data Models Using Gibbs Sampling‘. David and Alan discuss the origins of … Continue reading An Interview with Alan Gelfand

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General, Journal updates, Methods papers, Robert May Prize, Society, Virtual Issues

2017 Robert May Prize Winner: Jonathan Henshaw

The Robert May Prize is awarded annually for the best paper published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution by an Early Career Researcher. We’re delighted to announce that the 2017 winner is Jonathan Henshaw, for his article ‘A unified measure of linear and nonlinear selection on quantitative traits‘.

The standard approach to quantifying natural selection, developed by Lande and Arnold, does not allow for comparable metrics between linear (i.e. selection on the mean phenotype) and nonlinear (i.e. selection on all other aspects of the phenotypic distribution, including variance and the number of modes) selection gradients. Jonathan Henshaw’s winning submission provides the first integrated measure of the strength of selection that applies across qualitatively different selection regimes (e.g. directional, stabilizing or disruptive selection). Continue reading “2017 Robert May Prize Winner: Jonathan Henshaw”

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General, Journal updates, Methods papers, Robert May Prize, Society, Virtual Issues

2016 Robert May Prize Winner: Gabriella Leighton

The Robert May Prize is awarded annually for the best paper published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution by an Early Career Researcher. We’re delighted to announce that the 2016 winner is Gabriella Leighton, for her article ‘Just Google it: assessing the use of Google Images to describe geographical variation in visible traits of organisms‘.

‘Just Google it’ marks an important step in converting ecology to an armchair science. Many species (e.g. owls, hawks, bears) are difficult, time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous to observe. It would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to spend time, energy and risk lives having to observe organisms in the field! Continue reading “2016 Robert May Prize Winner: Gabriella Leighton”

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Meetings

A Big Database and Big Models Pave the Way for Big Questions in Ecology

This post was provided by Sean McMahon.

Sean is an Associate Editor for Methods in Ecology and Evolution and is a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Institution based at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.  His research focuses on the ecological mechanisms that structure forest communities, with interests spanning the fields of demography, physiology, and remote sensing.

The 100th anniversary of the Ecological Society of America was celebrated in Baltimore, Maryland at their Annual Conference in August. This year a record 10,000 ecologists attended the six day event. ESA conferences now boast a staggering number of scientific presentations, ranging from numerous plenary talks, organized oral sessions and regular oral presentation sessions to lightening talks, posters, workshops and mixers. It was both exhilarating and overwhelming, but featured a truly impressive amount of science.

As the sheer magnitude of the event made attending even a fraction of the talks impossible, it feels odd to highlight any particular presentations. Two talks, however – both on the final morning of the conference – did strike me as worth mentioning; not because they featured groundbreaking science, or novel insights, but because they reflect potentially powerful new platforms from which groundbreaking science might develop. Continue reading “A Big Database and Big Models Pave the Way for Big Questions in Ecology”

Unknown's avatarIndia Stephenson1 Comment