Annotating specimens and other data

Another plant-based research use case that I like is to score phenology across major groups (of course, some are easier to score than others). This would generate a massive data set to evaluate change in flowering time, a key indicator of climate change that has implications on ecosystem services like pollination. Of course, this can be put in an evolutionary context too. There have been some great regional studies done but in a more global context this would be powerful (Nice California example: https://www.capturingcaliforniasflowers.org/). This can be a great citizen science project (a few tools have already been developed) and at some point we may be able to get at least some semi-automated results from image analysis/AI approaches. To my knowledge, the tools do not use an annotation framework but spreadsheets with the data are available and in other cases the data is being recorded directly into CMSs.

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