InsectUp: Crowdsourcing Insect Observations to Assess Demographic Shifts and Improve Classification
arXiv:1906.11898
Abstract
Insects play such a crucial role in ecosystems that a shift in demography of just a few species can have devastating consequences at environmental, social and economic levels. Despite this, evaluation of insect demography is strongly limited by the difficulty of collecting census data at sufficient scale. We propose a method to gather and leverage observations from bystanders, hikers, and entomology enthusiasts in order to provide researchers with data that could significantly help anticipate and identify environmental threats. Finally, we show that there is indeed interest on both sides for such collaboration.
Appearing at the International Conference on Machine Learning, AI for Social Good Workshop, Long Beach, United States, 2019 Appearing at the International Conference on Computer Vision, AI for Wildlife Conservation Workshop, Seoul, South Korea, 2019 5 pages, 6 figures