I am a PhD student working on bird pollination syndromes in South Africa and looking specifically at urbanizations effect on sunbirds and sugarbirds. By drawing from a large sample size of imagery from iNaturalist projects, I am aiming to establish which plant species are preferred for pollination interaction by which sunbird (and sugarbird) species. I'll be doing further analysis regarding trait matching across urban gradients, but at this stage I'm looking for machine learning support. In order to work through large sample sizes of images of avian nectarivores on plants, I was looking to CNN and machine learning methods to help identify the interactive bird and plant species. I suspect these deep learning tools could be highly useful in this instance and was looking for advice on an AI / machine learning organization that could assist me with this methodology?
Thanks for any help and contacts,
Craig
3 January 2025 3:55am
Hi @craigg, my background is machine learning and deep neural networks, and I'm also actively involved with developing global geospatial ecological models, which I believe could be very useful for your PhD studies.
First of all to your direct challenges, I think there will be many different approaches, which could serve more or less of your interests.
As one idea that came up, I think it will be possible in the coming months, through a collaboration, to "fine-tune" a general purpose "foundation model" for ecology that I'm developing with University of Florida and Stanford University researchers. More here.
You may also find the 1+ million plant trait inferences searchable by native plant habitats at Ecodash.ai to be useful. A collaborator at Stanford actually is from South Africa, and I was just about to send him this e.g. https://ecodash.ai/geo/za/06/johannesburg
I'm happy to chat about this, just reach out! I think there could also be a big publication in Nature (or something nice) by mid-2025, with dozens of researchers demonstrating a large number of applications of the general AI techniques I linked to above.
6 February 2025 9:57am
We are putting together a special issue in the journal Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology and are welcoming (review) papers on the use of AI in bird research. https://www.nisc.co.za/news/202/journals/call-for-papers-special-issue-on-ai-and-ornithology
Lance Legel