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Research on plant-pollinator interactions requires a diversity of perspectives and approaches, and documenting changing pollinator-plant interactions due to declining insect diversity and climate change is especially challenging. Natural history collections are increasingly important for such research and can provide ecological information across broad spatial and temporal scales. Here, we describe novel approaches that integrate museum specimens from insect and plant collections with field observations to quantify pollen networks over large spatial and temporal gradients. We present methodological strategies for evaluating insect-pollen network parameters based on pollen collected from museum insect specimens. These methods provide insight into spatial and temporal variation in pollen-insect interactions and complement other approaches to studying pollination, such as pollinator observation networks and flower enclosure experiments. We present example data from butterfly pollen networks over the past century in the Great Basin Desert and Sierra Nevada Mountains, United States. Complementary to these approaches, we describe rapid pollen identification methods that can increase speed and accuracy of taxonomic determinations, using pollen grains collected from herbarium specimens. As an example, we describe a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automate identification of pollen. We extracted images of pollen grains from 21 common species from herbarium specimens at the University of Nevada Reno (RENO). The CNN model achieved exceptional accuracy of identification, with a correct classification rate of 98.8%. These and similar approaches can transform the way we estimate pollination network parameters and greatly change inferences from existing networks, which have exploded over the past few decades. These techniques also allow us to address critical ecological questions related to mutualistic networks, community ecology, and conservation biology. Museum collections remain a bountiful source of data for biodiversity science and understanding global change.
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Recognition of Pollen-Bearing Bees from Video Using Convolutional Neural Network
In this paper, the recognition of pollen bearing honey bees from videos of the entrance of the hive is presented. This computer vision task is a key component for the automatic monitoring of honeybees in order to obtain large scale data of their foraging behavior and task specialization. Several approaches are considered for this task, including baseline classifiers, shallow Convolutional Neural Networks, and deeper networks from the literature. The experimental comparison is based on a new dataset of images of honeybees that was manually annotated for the presence of pollen. The proposed approach, based on Convolutional Neural Networks is shown to outperform the other approaches in terms of accuracy. Detailed analysis of the results and the influence of the architectural parameters, such as the impact of dedicated color based data augmentation, provide insights into how to apply the approach to the target application.
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- PAR ID:
- 10058461
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 314 to 322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/WACV.2018.00041
