I am involved in a biodiversity image captioning project involving living arthropods and I was wondering if there was an appropriate place to discuss a project like this and explore whether the community might be interested? Or are there any other channels that are recommended for reaching taxonomists who might want to contribute? We have a local group of taxonomists that have dedicated their time to help out but was hoping to get some advice on how to improve the outreach!
Welcome to the iNat Forum, and since it looks like you just joined iNaturalist a few days ago, welcome to iNaturalist as well!
Since this is your first post on the iNat Forum, and since your iNat profile doesn’t yet show any bio, any observations, any IDs, or any linked projects, it might be helpful to share a bit more context about yourself, about what you are doing, and about what you are looking for.
Arthropod taxonomy is very insular. Most workers focus on just a handful of groups or biogeographical regions and pay relatively little attention to others, and communication also tends to be in pretty small circles (widening in proportion to how much attention those groups get.) You may want to be more specific in what you’re looking for; Lepidopteran taxonomy is probably pretty easy to get commentary on, but Proturan taxonomy is something probably less than 10-20 people in the world can give insight on. And there are some groups where the number of specialists available for outreach dwindles to just 2-3 people globally.
Seconding spidercat’s questions. Depending on what you’re going for, though, you might get somewhere by sending out something to the Entomology Collections Network Listserv (ECN-L). Lots of taxonomists in there.
Have no idea. Something like my project “Indian Hopper observers and identifiers” may be used at the level of arthropoda and at a worldwide scale, but that will be another project.
Hi, if your project would be Europe-based and involve bees, feel free to contact me (best way would be to send a private message to my iNaturalist account)
Thanks for the welcome! A short introduction of myself, I am a Master’s student in Bioinformatics at the University of Guelph in Canada. My research project focuses on enhancing an existing AI biodiversity system (link) by improving its image captioning component, so the model can generate biologically accurate descriptions of organisms from images.
To do this, we’re building a dataset of image–caption pairs to so the AI model is able to describe organisms similar to how a human expert would. The dataset currently includes images of living arthropods from Insecta (Lepidoptera, Odonata, Hemiptera, Isopoda, etc.) and Arachnida (Araneae). These captions will be used to support larger biodiversity projects to make images more useful for research and conservation strategies. Therefore we are hoping to expand our outreach to more taxonomists who might be interested in contributing!
I replied in more detail above but in short, yes the captions are used to fine-tune the AI model so it can generate biologically accurate descriptions of organisms.
(best way would be to send a private message to my iNaturalist account)