This summer Tomas Pickering proposes to build an on-line guide to the leaves on Barro Colorado Island and collect material to evaluate different identification technologies.

The summer's goal is for Tom to assemble, scan, and voucher thousands of leaves from Panama. He will build an IDnature guide on Discover Life as he does so. Among the people who will help is Osvaldo Calderon, who has spent the last 20 years identifying a million things that have fallen into leaf/flower/fruit traps run by Joe Wright's ESP project. Osvaldo can quickly identify leaves to over 500 species of the island's 700+ species. Tom will work with Osvaldo and try to put Osvaldo's expertise on-line. In return, Tom will train Osvaldo on how to use software tools on Discover Life so that Osvaldo can continue to refine the guide after Tom returns to Georgia.

Tom will also work with Mireya Correa, Carmen Galdames, and other botanists, such as the CTFS team working on BCI's 50-hectare plot. Robin Foster at the Field Museum, for example, has offered us use of all his images. Steve Paton, the ESP's terrestrial data manager, will supervise Tom and help him with photography and processing images. Tom will opportunistically take photographs of fruit, flowers, and bark to add to Steve's collection of plant images.

Discover Life will provide barcode labels and data management tools for the samples and images. They will also provide technical support and training. Ashley MacDonald, who has built an IDnature guide to over 1,200 North American trees and shrubs will start the process when she goes to Panama this March to help train people at STRI how to build guides and get images and other data on-line. Bob Magill and other botanists at Missouri Botanical Garden will help in integrating an electronic version of the published Flora of Panama and information from their Tropicos database.

In addition to building an IDnature guide on Discover Life, we would like the project to compare the ability of various identification technologies (interactive keys, published dichotonous ones, image analysis software, genetic barcodes, etc.). Steve Buchmann in Arizona has offered to scan a limited number of leaves at very high resolution (from 72 dpi up to 5880 dpi) to evaluate how image quality affects the ability of image recognition software to identify leaves. We plan to send a set of high-quality images of the undersides of 20 leaves from each of 100 species to Norm Platnick and Kim Russell at AMNH. When funds become available, they will use these images to train and test their neural net identification software. Thus, we hope to test various methods in identifying leaves relative to other technologies. In short, it's a challenge. Humans versus machines. Novice users versus experts. High tech versus low tech. Expensive versus shoe-string equipment. It's a winners-get-a-bottle-of-wine challenge. And, with luck, there will be a lot of publicity and a methods paper in Science for us all.

The invitation to participate is open to all serious folks. Eventually we hope to evaluate Lucid, Delta, and genetic barcoding technologies too. When Tom processes the leaves that Osvaldo, he, and others collect, he will preserve a subset for genetic work. He will also collect additional samples that we can use to test each technology, i. e., when exam time comes, each team will be challenged with a 100 unknown leaves, including species that they have not seen before. They will be asked to identify species and recognize new ones. We plan to get an independent review panel of judges who will set up the criteria for success and make sure the competition is fair. We will come up with various metrics to compare each of our technologies and evaluate the pros and cons of each.

Jeff Lake, a graduate student of Steve Hubbell, is comparing leaf morphology and has considerable experience scanning leaves. He will help us develop the best protocol to scan the leaves. Tom will database the scanned images and photographs and put them on Discover Life servers. Thus, Jeff and other web users will have access to them.

If all goes well, by the end of the summer, we will have tested an on-line guide to the leaves of 300 - 500 species on BCI. If the system works, then experts in Panama can add more species. We will also have a large number of scanned images, vouchered leaves, and material for DNA work. These will permit us to compare the effectiveness of different identification technologies.

Discover Life | Tomas Pickering