Herbarium specimens represent an outstanding source of material with which to study plant phenological changes in response to climate change. The fine‐scale phenological annotation of such specimens is nevertheless highly time consuming and requires substantial human investment and expertise, which are difficult to rapidly mobilize.
We trained and evaluated new deep learning models to automate the detection, segmentation, and classification of four reproductive structures of
The main outcome of our study is that the performance of detection and segmentation can vary significantly with: (i) the type of annotations used for training, (ii) the type of reproductive structures, and (iii) the size of the reproductive structures. In the case of
This method has great potential for automating the analysis of reproductive structures in high‐resolution images of herbarium sheets. Deeper investigations regarding the taxonomic scalability of this approach and its potential improvement will be conducted in future work.